


Water on Mars

by meggannn



Series: Conquest of Spaces [2]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Destroy Ending, Disabled Character, Earthborn (Mass Effect), F/M, London, Recovery, Sole Survivor (Mass Effect)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-26
Updated: 2016-12-26
Packaged: 2018-09-02 21:08:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 44,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8683459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meggannn/pseuds/meggannn
Summary: With the Reapers gone, there’s Garrus and there’s Shepard, and there’s trying to make it through the aftermath with themselves intact.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** There are a lot of typical themes here found in most post-war fic, but to be safe, I’m listing any and all that might apply. This fic contains PTSD, mild panic attacks, injuries and disabilities, recovery, some corpses (including children), and with earthborn Shepard, allusions to childhood homelessness and all that entails. None of it is particularly gruesome or descriptive.
> 
> I need to thank [tetrahedrals](http://tetrahedrals.tumblr.com), [Jen](http://rushvalleys.tumblr.com), and [Keely](http://keelificent.tumblr.com) for providing all of the editing, nudging, hard questions, suggestions, and support a fic writer needs. All remaining errors are entirely mine.
> 
> Recommended listening is ["Slow Show" by The National](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCR0Tr2HTfA). I hope you enjoy!

Garrus knows the instant he starts bleeding.

“Shit,” he says aloud, which never helps as much as he thinks it will. Something thin and jagged — rebar? — has caught underneath his cracked chestplate, and he’d jerked the slab upward in one swift movement, feeling his underarmor tearing a moment too late. A sharp pain catches to the left of his abdomen: an underplated area, doubly vulnerable without his heavy armor today. His side grows hot and wet. Something begins trickling past his hip and down one leg.

The weird animal trapped underneath the stone block doesn’t budge, continues staring at him with steady amber eyes. He knows the fear of a starving, injured creature when he sees it, just as he knows he hardly fits the picture of a familiar human figure that it might recognize.

“Well come on, then,” he grunts. The damn thing had been crying for over an hour as he shifted the debris; straining as he is now, he could only hold a slab up for so long while this weird Earth animal decides whether it wants a rescue or not. His visor, still cracked but churning out statistics, provides the thing’s heart rate and heat temperature. It appears low, for what little he knows of terrestrial fauna, and the way he sees it leaning on its hind legs suggests an injury on its front paws.

A — dog, he thinks? Aren’t those common on Earth? It doesn’t look like any dog he’s seen in the holos, but Vega had once told him dogs look all sorts of different, depending on the breed. It’s hard to get a clear look from his angle through the strain of concentration, but in the dark it looks a sort of rusted orange, with a wet gray undercoat that might have once been a cleaner off-white. It slowly steps into the muggy daylight, peering up at him to sniff his boot before cautiously inching back under, into the dark.

“No, don’t — ” But it sees freedom behind him, and quicker than he registers, there’s a rustle of movement to his right as the animal rushes past him into the street. Exhausted, he lets the slab of concrete fall with a large _thud_ , mindful not to hit his feet and turns to sit atop it, sore arms dragging. Across the ruined street between a darkened alley, he sees two small, bright eyes staring at him from above an upturned trash bin. A blink later, and the thing is gone.

Garrus looks up. It’s still drizzling, but there's still daylight to see by; a phenomenon he has learned is common here. Traynor had explained on the SR-2 that England was to water as Palaven was to heat, and that was before a mile of the embankment had collapsed and the river — the _Thames_ , as humans call it — had spilled onto the South Bank, flooding several neighborhoods and who knows how many civilians. Now, if he believes the word, this river has become the source of the worst flooding and water damage the country has seen since the invention of the modern dam.

He still has to stop himself from pointing out that the war will be responsible for _the worst_ galaxy-wide superlatives for a long time coming, but even now, it never quite seems appropriate.

“At least the flood took some Brutes with it,” Vega had said last month, though the words were heavy. There had been several turian units stationed in this area as well.

Garrus had set out that morning with the intention, or excuse, of finding their ID tags. Standing upright within the street, the water reaches his spur. Not enough to drown in, but enough to deter what little remains of the Earth-stationed Hierarchy from volunteering, especially when manpower is still needed remodeling passenger ships, stabilizing the relays, maintaining would-be temporary base camps that are slowly turning permanent, and cataloguing remains — and the rare survivor — that don’t have the misfortune to be trapped in flooded areas.

He’d passed several human, asari, and a few salarian teams diving down into what Shepard had called the “tube,” an underground labyrinth he understood to have once been an old-fashioned public transportation system, abandoned since the introduction of the skycar. He had even noted some krogans participating — who appeared to be surprisingly good swimmers — and looked to be putting their the extra muscle to good use, carrying larger oxygen tanks to the stranded.

Now, he sits atop a fallen concrete slab in the middle of a flooded neighborhood on a strange planet, and stretches his legs. They hang several inches above the murky water. On his right is the piece of rebar that had struck him, jutting out of the ruins of what he thinks might’ve once been a cafe. The tip is covered in dark blue blood, already drying.

He presses at his waist where he’d felt it break skin, trying to assess the damage without going through the trouble of removing his armor. All of his medigel dispensers are either broken or flashing small _warning: low reserves_ icons. He’d dispersed most of the gel he’d had as he passed by the rescued this morning. Some very resourceful, very lucky civilians had barricaded themselves within underground bunkers or reinforced basements with generators and rations when the Reapers hit, and were still being found today.

“Leftover bunkers from the World Wars,” a young, dripping wet human man had explained as he was smothered in towels and handed a levo protein bar. He seemed surprisingly cheerful for someone who had just been dragged up through a small lake of what looked to Garrus like sewage water, and had nearly the same odor.  “Cheers. Sheer chance I remembered. Turns out those A-levels were good for something.”

Plain luck, or some kind of miracle, even now, so long after the last husk had fallen and the monstrous bodies of the Reaper still lay scattered across the cities like collapsed skyscrapers. Some were so lucky, and yet barely an hour ago he’d seen an SAR team mourning their latest discovery: several drowned children in the basement of an orphanage. The water kept them afloat and safe from scavengers, but their skin looked so bloated, nearly translucent, and their eyes still open and so —

His new wound throbs. He applies more pressure, and judges the odds of running into another squad with spare medigel any time soon unlikely. It seems a hassle to call a Hierarchy shuttle for a pickup on a minor injury like this, or even ping Cortez, who’s been eager to put the drop shuttle to good use since it had been put back in his hands.

The drizzle is turning heavier; a small pool is collecting in his collar and beginning to soak his neck. It’s summertime for this planet, and he's been told that while showers during this time of year don’t last long, it’s unwise to be caught outside. He should get going.

Garrus glances up again at the clouds, now darkening, and wonders how long he could lose himself in this ancient, flooded Earth city before someone back home begins to assume the worst.

Shepard is being released from the hospital today. She’ll wonder where he’s gone.

* * *

For two months he’d clamored for news, any news, the smallest rumor or faintest lead, and then on an otherwise unremarkable day, the only standing hospital within the greater London area had received a transfer request. Several nameless patients were being kept in an overrun field medic tent about twenty kilometers out, their release delayed by by fried omnitools, lost ID tags, and a million anonymous faces. Some patients were awake and only needed monitoring until release, and others were trapped in induced comas until luck or divine intervention saw fit to save them.

We could treat them, the local staff had said, but not without time and resources, and we need the space. There are people who are still dying here and can’t be moved. We’ve already turned too many away.

In the hearts of humanity’s largest urban centers, two months after the Crucible exploded and took out half the Citadel with it, most of the dying were already dead. Those with minor injuries, or the luckiest few who had managed to survive severe trauma and find aid in time, were already recovered or nearly so. Yes, they had accepted the request.

And then one of the patient’s DNA came back a match on a missing soldier.

They’d shown him a picture. It didn’t look like her. It didn’t look like anyone. Still, he’d wanted to know everything: how many injuries, how severe, how long in surgery, how long in recovery, how long until she wakes. Then they told him he could see her.

A skull fracture; a calf; two fingers; three cracked ribs, several bruised; too many lacerations to count. The leg had been amputated on site; torso wrapped; fracture healing slowly with new cybernetics; none of it without scars. For two months the patient had been in limbo waiting for proper treatment, two months among the other lost, anonymous faces in a wet tent in the English countryside. Things he had heard, but didn’t fully register, not until he saw —

“Garrus,” she’d said when he walked into her room for the first time, and that low, hoarse sound hadn’t sounded like the woman he knew to be Shepard at all. “I need to speak to Anderson.”

“Why?” Garrus replied. Some time in all of this, he had taken her hand; he still remembers the feeling of so many bones in such a small frame, just as he remembers thinking something so frail had no right to be associated with his commanding officer. She was strong. She would make it.

They’d said not to overwhelm her. Don’t talk about the war unless she asks. Head trauma, we can never know. First determine what she remembers.

“It was a trap,” she rasped, and coughed for so long he got her two refills of water. “A nest of thresher maws. The captain’ll bring it to Hackett. I need to report in.”

“I’ll tell him myself,” Garrus had said, and held her hand as she drifted off.

Time, the human doctors consoled him when he explained what happened later. They hadn’t said how much.

Miranda had still been missing, back then. He couldn’t help thinking that if she’d been there, a more efficient schedule of surgeries and plans for rehabilitation might already be in effect, plans that might get quicker, less painful results than the _waiting_ they had been stuck in since they limped back into the Sol system. Longer.

He’d told her to come back alive, and she had. They’d never made any promises on condition.

* * *

As he reaches the hospital, he receives a quick message from Cortez confirming his predictions: they’ve grounded her, of course. Indefinite medical leave of absence. Completely justifiable, if you ask him, though he’d jump into that flooded district before saying so aloud within earshot of Shepard. She has difficulty walking straight for minutes at a time without needing a rest, her prosthetics still need regular PT, the new eye is still sensitive to daylight without cloud cover, and the only reason they’d released her in the first place is because Chakwas knows her patients well enough to recognize when spending time in a hospital is starting to do more harm than good.

“Garrus,” Shepard calls out from the entrance. She’s waiting for him at the edge of the pickup lot in the wheelchair. Her left eye is still covered, but even with one side of her face visible, he can tell she’s in much better spirits than he’d imagined with a semi-permanent medical leave hanging over her head. “What the hell happened to you?”

He looks down. He’d grabbed some medigel from a station at the front and removed his chestpiece to apply it himself, but he hadn’t cleaned the blood off his plating. It’s soaked through the underarmor beneath and looks nearly black against his suit. “Accident,” he says. “All fixed.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Nurse at the front gave me a clean bill of health.” He puts his right hand over his crest as he walks over — a little lower than where his heart is, and on the wrong side, but he’s really been hanging around humans for too long. “Scout’s honor.”

She smiles at that. He hazards a guess that today might be a better one; no doubt she's cheered by the prospect of traveling somewhere that isn't fifty feet within the hospital's perimeter. “Have you seen our chauffer?”

“Not for a few days.” Garrus reaches her wheelchair stopbreaks and grasps the handles, bringing her closer to the street to give Cortez better access. “You saw how thrilled he was to have the Kodiak back. He might’ve coerced Vega to hijack it with him and run off to Riyoo.”

“Rio, Garrus. Do you — ” She breaks off into a cough that lasts long enough for him to grow concerned, but not enough to convince him to call a nurse over. Shepard waves a hand in front of her, as if to clear the air of whatever was caught in her lungs. “Do you even know where that is?”

“Haven’t a clue,” he replies, eyes scanning the horizon. He spots a familiar vehicle headed their way amidst the dozen dotting the sky. “There he is.”

Overhead, the sun is beginning to break through the heavy clouds and Shepard shields her visible eye with her left hand — Garrus is still getting used to two of her fingers glinting of steel. From the hospital’s position on the hill, London seems to flatten, and rows of crumbling office and thin townhouses roll off into the direction of the river. Just three months ago, the majority of the city’s infrastructure had been abandoned. And then, in a city far to the north — one whose name he still had trouble pronouncing, which Shepard loved to tease him over — what remained of several steel manufacturing warehouses made contact, and offered their tools and labor in exchange for transportation, shelter, and rations. Half of the skyline is now filled with rack supports, towering cranes, and assisting helicopters. He knows it’s the result of several blocks of being reduced to rubble, knows that the planet and many more are filled with the same sights, and yet the view, in a breathtakingly terrible sort of way, is unlike any other he’s seen on Earth so far.

An odd reminder, that the Reapers didn’t destroy everything in their genocidal cycles. They took intelligent life, but left tools to rebuild and reuse.

In front of them, the skycar lands. A door opens and a dark head pokes over the roof of the car on the other side.

“You parked in the wrong direction,” Shepard calls out, and Cortez laughs as he heads around the front. “Cars go the other way here, remember?”

“This is the thanks I get.” He leans down to embrace her gingerly, but Garrus sees her grip is hard on his back, squeezing tight. “Wanted a familiar face to take you to your new home. They finally gave me clearance to fly — I had to take every driving test known to mankind all over again after the crash, can you believe? Hey, Garrus.”

“Good to see you, Steve.” And it is: Cortez’s head injury after the crash in Westminster had taken him out for three months, and by the time the Kodiak was put on the roster for repairs, he’d been itching to get his hands behind any wheel at all. “You sure you passed that exam? I don’t recall seeing your turn signal there.”

“See if you can find another pilot to put up with you for the ride over, then.” Cortez grasps his hand firmly, then steps back for a better look at Shepard. “All right, Captain, I’m afraid this thing doesn't have handicap access. How are we doing this?”

Shepard frowns at that, and Garrus tries to hide his amusement. While her status had still been MIA, Shepard had been posthumously promoted by some hasty decision-makers within the Alliance brass. It was news Shepard had later greeted in the hospital with humor, then disbelief, and finally shock as she realized the news was, in fact, quite true after all.

“Gently, please,” she responds, and when Garrus leans down to remove her from the wheelchair, she squints at him. “I can walk long enough to make it into a damn aircar, Garrus.”

She seems in a good enough mood today. Some days, her struggles to rise from bed set the tone for the rest of the morning. “You didn’t have a leg six weeks ago. Indulge me.”

“I won’t get used to it if I don’t test it,” she argues, but lets him lift and relocate her to the back of the car without further protesting. “What, I don’t even get to sit in the front?”

Garrus recites: “‘In the case of an emergency, prioritization should be given to children, the elderly — ’”

“ — I know what the damn C-Sec traffic regulations say, you just want shotgun.”

He hmms. “Consider it payback for all the times you stuck me in the back in the Mako. My legs are twice as long as yours, I need twice the room.”

“You were the only one who knew how to operate that machine gun without it overheating every ten seconds. It was a tactical placement.”

“And we’re off,” Cortez announces, and Garrus registers he’s folded the chair into the trunk and started the car in the time it’s taken him to climb into the front seat. The ignition burns, and within seconds, they’re airborne. “Joker wasn’t kidding about you two.”

In the rearview mirror, Garrus sees Shepard smile. “My pilots are gossiping about their commanding officer?”

“What’s there to gossip about?” Garrus muses as he looks down over the diminishing landscape. “We’re not discreet.”

“Yes, that’s what we gossip about.”

Cortez drives in silence for a few minutes, in which time the sun finally decides to break its cloud cover and washes the gray from the city. In the year he’s been stationed here, Garrus has learned sunlight is a rare enough occurrence in this city to enjoy it, even if the car’s shields aren’t enough to fully block the window glare.

“We’re nearly there — oh, I don’t think I said where. You’ll be in Islington,” Cortez tells them. “They put Hackett in a place near you while he’s here, though for security I’m not meant to say where.”

“It’s all right, I’ll just open the window and shout ‘till he responds. Islington’s quiet enough.”

“You’ll — that’s right! I keep forgetting because you sound so American. You’re from here, right, or somewhere around here?”

“Somewhere around here,” Shepard repeats. Garrus sees her in his passenger window staring down at the tiny buildings. He thinks, briefly, about saying something, but decides just as quickly against.

As Shepard indicated, another few minutes bring them to a quiet neighborhood on the edge of the city. The Reapers had targeted Earth’s largest population centers, but left the suburbs to their mutated ground forces: now, a year later, some of the luckier streets look absurdly picturesque, as though the neighborhoods had been locked down for quarantine and emerged only when the war was over. Garrus recalls from that morning the sight of entire streets flooded with debris, murky water, and drowned creatures. Unnerving, how quickly many communities were able to bounce back, while not two kilometers away, so many others are struggling for anything from spare blankets to children’s toothpaste.

He’s heard some human politicians are considering abandoning certain districts of South London entirely, at least until the flood recedes in the years to come. Privately, Garrus can’t help but sympathize. The shock of seeing those young bodies this morning, so long after the fighting finished, hasn’t quite left him.

“Rio’s nice,” Shepard says suddenly, and Garrus is brought back to the present as they descend. “I’ll take you there one day. If you want. And, y’know. If it isn’t rubble.”

It takes Garrus a moment to remember what they had been talking about. “Jacob kept mentioning this bar on the SR2.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I know the one he’s talking about. Every candidate who makes it to N7 gets familiar with all the pubs in the city.” She pauses, and in a moment, her voice grows heavier. “But that was a while ago. Not sure if the school’s still even there.”

“The Brazilian Republic reestablished stable communication towers with UK HQ last month,” Cortez says as he steers the car down onto the street, empty save for scattered spots where bullet holes and rubble pattern the concrete. Garrus spots one indent in the road, notes the angle, and recognizes a sniper’s missed shot — then Shepard’s back door is opening, and he quickly climbs out of the car.

“Let me at least walk to the damn house,” Shepard doesn’t quite snap at him, but it’s a rare enough tone that he lets her have her way. “I haven’t stretched my legs all morning.”

Garrus notes that Cortez wisely remains quiet as he collects the folded wheelchair from the backseat and brings it to the front stoop. Shepard’s movements are slow-going but steady, and Garrus resists the urge to help her arm; instead, he heads to the front door on his own.

In his mind’s eye, he imagines the man that lived here resembling Udina: a self-assured utilitarian workaholic, and judging by the exterior and neighborhood, a man with expensive tastes. White stucco and symmetrical columns frame black doors down the block, each unit only discernible by the painted figures written over the front door. Exactly why the Alliance thinks they’ll need a three-story unit with a balcony, he’s at a loss. The only signs that the neighborhood is uninhabited are the dead plants hanging over the railings above.

Garrus flicks open his omnitool and begins inspecting the security shields.

“Here are the codes.” Cortez hands him a datapad. “Should open the front and back doors, and you can adjust the shields inside. Though I’m sure you’ll add your own security locks — just let me know when you’re finished tinkering, ‘cause the Alliance needs full access in case of emergencies.” He looks up at Garrus and smiles apologetically. “Sorry. It’s their property, technically. We’re just borrowing it ‘till Shepard’s fit for duty again.”

“Since when does the Navy own terrace houses in south England?” Shepard has caught up to them on the porch. Garrus glances at her; she’s frowning down at her left leg, rubbing her knee. Probably unused to the prosthetics’ weight; he’ll remember to adjust the specs.

“It belonged to a Lord of Parliament, actually,” Cortez says as he keys open the electronic lock. “Hence the security. He also needed wheelchair access. But I’m supposed to assure you you’re free to come and go so long as you obey the doc’s orders. Here, I’m hooking it to your omnitools. Should recognize you automatically now.”

“Is there a specific reason for all the extra measures?” Garrus asks.

“Besides your own peace of mind, you mean?” Cortez shrugs and the door finally lights green, swishing open. “Nothing specific, but I think we’d be idiots to count everyone in the galaxy as a well-wisher at the moment. I guess someone called dibs on Buckingham Palace.”

Garrus has been in Alliance prefabs and colony settlements before, though he’s never stepped inside a human civilian’s house, and certainly not yet one on Earth that hadn't been reduced to rubble. He’s grown used to smaller furniture and foreign appliances from his years aboard the Normandy, though there are things within this unit he’s certain he’s never seen before, not even in Anderson’s apartment. The first oddities that grab his attention are the oddly shaped symmetrical hooks jetting out from the wall on the left entry hallway, and a — piano? — sitting behind the staircase leading to the next floor. The entryway on the right appears to lead to a sitting room, and from there, a doorway into what looks like a small but tidy kitchen.

It seems a fair bit smaller than he would have imagined for a politician’s home, and — by his best estimation — would come up short standing next to a councilor’s apartment on the Citadel. In truth, everything about the buildings here seem to prioritize height and narrowness in a way he’s never observed in human architecture before. He vaguely wonders if it’s a preference thing or an Earth thing.

“Bit much,” Shepard says dryly. “They’ve checked for any surprises?”

“Bomb dogs were in this morning, the place tested negative for airborne toxins for both of you, no flooding or structural damage, and the shield security passed all their tests. You’re all set.”

She nods. Then, favoring her right leg, Shepard moves into the next room over, where a low-lying couch sits facing a grated fireplace, and sinks into it without another word. 

Garrus isn’t quite sure what to make of this, and by the look Cortez gives him as soon as she’s out of the hall, neither is he. The pilot fixes him with a concerned look and nods his head toward her back. Garrus is fairly certain that means: _How is she?_

The most frustrating thing about human mannerisms, in his opinion, is that they nearly always expect a silent facial gesture in response, most of which turians are incapable of mimicking. Instead, Garrus shakes his head. _Not now._

“You’re allowed your pistol,” Cortez says for both of them to hear. “I’ll drop it off later, along with the rest of your things from the Normandy. No heavier firearms, I’m afraid. I think Hackett had to step on some toes to even get you that, so don’t be too loud with target practice.”

The back of Shepard’s head nods in acknowledgment and sinks further into the couch.

They share a look, and Cortez apparently decides it’s time for his departure. He hands the datapad over to Garrus and claps him on the shoulder — he takes that to mean _Let me know if I can do anything_ — and then heads out. A minute later, and Garrus hears the skycar’s engine power on, then drift away.

Garrus peers over the couch; she’s lying on her back, left leg propped up on a throw pillow. “You all right?”

“Fucking knee,” she says without opening her eyes. Not an invitation.

He puts the datapad with the codes on a side table next to a vase of dead flowers. Something strange about Earth flora has always irritated his nose; he takes the vase and heads to the back of the house, past the staircase and next to a thin elevator to the kitchen, where he deposits the flowers in the garbage and pours the old water down the drain.

Over the sink is a window; he peers outside, into the neighbor’s yard. Over the black iron fence he sees stray children’s toys are scattered across the yard, bright yellows and reds against small square of green grass, as though the family had simply left for a day out. Garrus is struck with a sudden feeling on realizing that this neighborhood might be empty at the moment, save for the two of them hidden away in this anonymous little building on the outskirts of the city.

He suddenly wants, more than anything, to speak to his father. The thought would have been hilarious not even two years ago — but zetabytes for personal comms outside the local cluster are still restricted, and he’d used up his quota for the week three days ago when Sol had come down with a flu. The colony they had been stationed in was for emergency military personnel, so no doubt his father had pulled some strings to achieve even that — or perhaps used Garrus’s name to receive shelter there, which is a bizarre thought.

The fact that they, too, are living in limbo until the Primarch gives the green light to begin relocation to Cipritine, is ironic. _Stuck_ isn’t the right word, but he feels _caught_ the same way, and yet —

Yet Victus still comes to him every month with reports of squad teams long missing on Earth, destroyed communication towers. But the Hierarchy never wants for volunteers; nothing, really, that would require a leader with his skillset; nothing requiring a sniper, or a combatant, or a fighter. There’s no fighting to be done except the ongoing battle with the elements, with their own technology, until they reach normalcy once again. Garrus has taken a few assignments since the end of the war, though never accepted anything that would bring him from the city for more than a week at a time. No particular reason, it was just — that someone is still here.

He has a sudden, sinking feeling that his father would know the right thing to do. He’d calculate the ramifications of each choice; he’d know how to deal with a shell-shocked partner trapped in slow, disjointed recovery. Know what to say if it becomes apparent if they’ll never fully recover.

Garrus is forcibly reminded that he’s never told his father about Shepard. Solana had known there was _some_ one, because older sisters would always be too perceptive for their own good, and she might have even swung a guess at his commanding officer, the only human he'd brought up more than twice in conversation. If so, she had kept her silence, for which he was more thankful than she’d ever know. It wasn’t that he was afraid of his father’s disapproval, or even that he anticipated he would disapprove at all, exactly —

The oddly empty silence behind him alerts Garrus to the realization that Shepard is no longer on the couch.

“Shepard?”

Ten seconds of searching discovers her in a bathroom behind the staircase, inspecting the wide marble counter. “Who needs a fucking dispenser for cotton buds?” she mutters as he approaches. In the fluorescent light, she looks paler than he’d first thought. “What they spend their money on…”

He watches her from his position in the doorway. She’s never more fond of swearing than when dealing with politicians and bureaucracy, but alone, between them, she’s rarely been so quick to dip into profanity without outside stress.

Shepard is from Earth. He had known that, vaguely, but during the war with both of their homeworlds burning, it seemed as insensitive a topic to bring up as his home on Palaven would’ve been. The specifics of her pre-service history weren’t widely acknowledged, and with Shepard’s steadfast silence on the matter, Garrus has never pretended to know more than most. Yet now, with a sudden sinking feeling, he recalls more, from his first and only foray into the extranet to search her name before he joined the Normandy all those years ago: articles with quick notes mentioning Shepard’s background, phrases like _scholarships for disadvantaged children_ and _difficult childhood_ floating from passing news terminals after her death. Some part of him had been relieved for her on her recovery, thinking her med leave might be easier on Earth, a familiar locale. Shepard was never sentimental: the destruction of her homeland wouldn’t bother her nearly as much as enforced leave and the slow, tedious climb back to physical health.

Watching her in the mirror, he wonders if he’d had the wrong of it — misjudged, or even underappreciated the damage this planet had done to her. With every passing moment, her hands clench the ceramic sink tighter and tighter, she looks more like she’s about to put a foot through the wall.

“Fucking waste,” she says lowly.

Garrus comes up behind her. “Hey.” He hesitates, then rubs one of her shoulders with his palm, wondering if it might be too much to remove his gloves. “You all right?”

“It’s stupid.” She closes her eyes, and her breath hitches. Garrus’s visor feeds him info on her slowly elevating heart rate. “It’s never — bothered me before.”

Garrus says, “Breathe, Shepard.”

“That’s the fucking problem,” she gasps, and in the corner of his eye, he sees her pulse is rising. Her clenched fingers are turning pale. “I was trying, I had to, but I kept — it was getting thinner and then nothing was coming in, it was — there just wasn’t — any _air_.”

“Okay,” he says, and takes her hand from the counter. “Then let’s get some. This place has to have a roof.”

* * *

Shepard is out of breath by the time they reach the top of the building, even using the elevator ( _lift_ , she calls it). A cloud of pigeons bursts into the air upon opening the rooftop door, and drops of water fly from the puddles that had collected from the earlier rainfall. To his surprise — though perhaps it shouldn’t be, given the affluence of the neighborhood — there is a park bench at the top facing west, as if to provide a view the sunset. Garrus has seen quite enough of Earth’s sun rising and setting over the past year, enough to dispel the romanticism for any future vids he may watch, but up here with Shepard, looking over rows of rooftops and trees neatly aligned on the sidewalks below, it does feel something more like… _a_ home, or as close to it as he’s felt in a long time.

Shepard heaves out a sigh as she sinks onto the bench with him. Her breathing has calmed, but her heart has not. She buries her face in her hands and rubs at her one open eye. “Thanks,” she mumbles.

In response, he reaches out one hand to twine a loose strand of hair within his fingers.

Her hair is longer after months in the hospital, though it’s — thinner, if that’s the right word, and now it falls around her face like a torn curtain. Shepard has always kept it shorter than most human women he’s seen; now her dark hair falls just to her collarbones, regrown after her cranial surgery. He stretches one arm comfortably around her shoulders, like he’d seen in the vids, and rubs her shoulder with his thumb.

They spend a while like this. With his other hand he turns off his visor to avoid watching the time. Shepard’s heart rate steadies, and color returns to her arms. Her breathing still sounds loud in the silence, but that she is breathing at all is miracle enough, sometimes, that the sheer improbability of both of their survival is enough to make him dizzy. And yet…

And yet.

He can handle flashbacks. He can handle medication. He can gladly do all of the work necessary around the house until she grows fully comfortable using the new prosthetics. But there had been no guidebook on helping your human girlfriend being grounded, on coming home at the end of the war for galactic life, on the emotional climb of learning how to be a person again after being a weapon for so long. Some psychologists might say — and he was sure several had already — that growing up as she did, she had never learned to be a person in the first place.

“Kinda falling apart here,” she mutters next to him. He glances over. “Thought I was good this morning.”

“You were good when I left,” he says. “You’re good now. It happens.”

“I need a gun,” she admits.

“You’ll have one this afternoon,” he says, “though I’m not sure it’s a good idea myself.” He’s definitely testing his luck now, but he’s always had an amusing sense that she likes it when he’s rude, if only in the guise of their typical banter. “With only one eye working at the moment, you’ll be an even worse shot than before.”

Shepard is silent for a moment, and then to his immense relief, she snorts quietly. “I want a rematch.”

“Maybe if I’m feeling charitable.”

On her other side, her left hand comes up to grasp his.

“ _Three fingers isn’t going to help your grip on that shotgun, Shepard_ ,” he had said as soon as he had reached her bedside from Germany, and spirits, sometimes he couldn’t believe the shit that came out of his mouth around her. “ _Though I know how inspiring I can be with a rifle, I won’t blame you for thinking so._ ”

She’d tried to smile at that, and opened her mouth to reply. Instead she’d coughed enough to hack up a lung, and the nurse had explained something about _new medication_ and _if she insists on talking, use the datapads_.

“How’s the knee?” he asks now. A close call, that she’d managed to make it out of surgery with it fully intact, but it’s been a constant source of trouble ever since, and the one painful variable that’s preventing optimism about her chances of serving in active duty again.

“Sore,” she grunts.

“Want me to take a look?”

“Later…” Shepard heaves a yawn. “Cor. It’s only two, isn’t it. How was your morning?”

Garrus reaches into his pocket and pulls out the seven fading ID tags he had managed to find amidst the waterlogged ruins of South London. He only recognizes three of the sigils. “More than I expected,” he admits. “There were twelve teams of about fifty men in that area. Most of recognizable identification has been washed away by now.”

“How deep is it?”

“The water? To the spur, or thereabouts. Deeper near the embankment, but on higher ground, just the ankle.”

Shepard stretches out her right leg next to his and frowns at it, trying to relate his system of measurement to her own. His mandibles twitch in amusement.

“Your neck might be the right equivalent,” he offers, and is thanked with a sharp elbow in his stomach, awakening the pain from this morning. The small laceration isn’t quite finished healing, but she doesn’t need to know that. “ _Oh_ , watch it.”

“Tosser.”

“The hell did you just say to me?”

“Another fun local way of saying ‘fuck off,” Shepard says, but she’s smiling again, so in the end, he counts it as a good day.

* * *

They settle into a tentative but peaceful routine. (That the idea of _settling_ could be used to fit them at all is strange in itself.) Shepard has been released under the strict condition that Garrus help her with physical therapy every morning and evening. Her weekly appointments in the hospital dwindle to check-ups “as necessary.”

“No reason not to expect a full recovery,” Chakwas says. “Just don’t push it — _both_ of you — and you can expect easier mobility for the leg within the next four weeks, easier functionality within eight weeks. We’ll reevaluate then.”

Per her instructions, Shepard keeps her left eye covered in direct daylight for about twelve days with a funny-shaped sort of black cloth badge. The fluorescent lighting in the hospital had been kinder to it than direct daylight. Shepard jokes on more than one occasion that she might take Jack up on her offer to hijack the Normandy and run away as pirates, which isn’t a reference Garrus completely understands, but he laughs anyway. After two weeks, she slowly familiarizes her new cornea to the sight of the English sunrise, and then, leaves the patch removed altogether. Garrus had been expecting an eye like Zaeed’s, paler and heterochromatic, but save for some darkened skin around the eyelid, it looks nearly identical to her other.

Her wounds from the collapsing Citadel had manifested in damage that stretched up the left side of her torso, bruising her ribcage, crushing one lung, and left her near immobile for the majority of the past year. Chakwas had privately confided to him that she counts it a miracle Shepard will regain use of her arm. Her left hand has remained largely intact, save for the two fingers that had been crushed at the second knuckle. As it is, they both understand without words that she is very, very lucky to have survived at all.

By comparison, the broken left leg and snapped spur Garrus had received courtesy of that damn Mako seems like an inconvenient bruise. He once joked to Shepard that it would just grow back — not true, but he doesn’t know if she knows it — and she had laughed. “Like a damn lizard,” was her verdict, and that had been that. He still uses the brace for his ankle on occasion, ignores the phantom pain of a long-gone appendage, and doesn’t bring it up again.

And yet. Shepard’s knee is still weak, unused to the balance of the prosthetic attached below it, and she spends most of her time inside the rowhouse, where she silently ignores the cane provided, opting instead for the crutches only when necessary despite their bulkiness and limited mobility. He knows the combination of drugs in her system keep her from sleeping more than a few hours at once. Bathing has become a new challenge entirely: the water undoubtedly reminds her too much of Despoina, of whatever had happened down in the abyss where that damn Leviathan had been lurking, but showers are out of the question. Her first attempt at a bath, she’d locked the door and hadn’t made a sound inside for two hours, and only her steady readings on his visor prevented him from panicking.

Nothing they hadn’t been warned about. Garrus handles all of this in ways he knows how. He mods the heat reader on his visor to alert him whenever her signature rises or drops in too short a time. He stays up with her the nights she can’t sleep, introduces her to classic turian card games he’d played in basic. They install a seat in the shower stall that’s easier on her leg. He never once forgets her medications.

(Garrus is resolved not to mention the topic of intimacy at all. Shepard, who had pursued him with no small amount of gusto even in her most stressful days during the war, now seems to have silently agreed that sex is out of the question. Garrus had grown used to taking her libido as an indicator of morale, so her quiet acceptance of this, without comment or joke, strikes something in him.)

The first few evenings, he had made certain to check in at least once, preferably twice each night. Around midnight and four in the morning, he’d crack the door open to find her rubbing her eyes or staring at the ceiling, exhausted but wide awake before him.

“You need anything?” he still asks quietly, every time. “Water?”

“I’m fine,” she murmurs, but it’s a default response: he suspects she’s so tired, she simply hadn’t expended the energy to listen to what he’d said.

If it reminds him a little too strongly of what his father must’ve gone through with his mother as he was playing vigilante on Omega, it’s never more than a passing thought. The parallel is too painful to consider.

It seems that if he had thought her mood might improve with a change of scenery, he would have been sorely disappointed. While no longer impatient to leave the hospital, she remains strangely distant, and well — it’s just that he would never imagine the word _moody_ to fit Shepard. She certainly doesn’t sulk or brood, yet in some moments, her glances about the house never give him any indication she feels at all comfortable in this place, much less as though it’s a step-up from the surgery table in terms of her recovery. She glances at the oddest things with suspicion bordering on contempt, things he might’ve thought were otherwise normal in human households: the lightly gilded staircase handrail, the crimson ornamental fixture hanging over the fireplace.

He focuses instead on maintaining their status quo. Shepard is alive and wakes up every morning, takes her shots, stretches new limbs, cleans and mods her recently delivered guns, occasionally steps up to the roof for a half-hearted attempt at target practice. He reads the news, keeps up with dextro supply lines, browses the local markets online for mods he’d lost during the last push back on Earth, and checks in with his family when the connection cooperates.

It’s only enough because it’s more than he thought he’d ever have again.

* * *

Then one morning, Garrus walks downstairs into the kitchen to find his deceased mother sitting at the table.

Oddly, his confusion isn’t over the fact that she should be dead. It’s over the realization that she’s drenched in blood.

“Garrus,” she says. It trickles from the ends of her mandibles, but despite that, she sounds exactly like she used to, not like – like she had in the end. She didn’t recognize his name, in the end. “Sweetheart. You’re doing well.”

He can’t move. Her blood is pooling on the kitchen floor. All he can think is, that’ll stain the tile, and Shepard will know she was here.

“Mom,” he croaks. “It’s – good to see you.”

“I heard about your engagement. I stopped by to say congratulations.”

 _I’m not engaged, Ma._ “I – right, yeah.” He’s engaged to Shepard. Is he? Yes, it’s a new development. They haven’t told anyone. He swallows. “Thanks.”

“Sit down and have some breakfast.” She gestures to the table, which is filled with food that nobody’s cooked for him since he left for service at age fifteen. Fresh ignota juice, rutanius sausage, yomburt wraps with the sauce he likes, the kind only his mother knows how to make properly. “Tell me about it all.”

Upstairs, a muffled thump sounds against the ceiling. Garrus wants to look, but he can’t draw his eyes away from the woman sitting at the table, the wonderful and terrible sight of her.

She reaches for a bowl. Blue blood is oozing from between her plates, dripping onto the sausage in fat drops. “Sounds like you’re hiding a new pet upstairs, Garrus. Don’t tell your father. He never liked animals.”

He opens his mouth to reply –

Garrus jolts awake to the sound of another _THUMP_ , louder than before. He knows instinctively it’s the sound of something large collapsing, as close as the room next door.

He rolls out of bed immediately. The sight of his mother covered in blood is still flashing through his mind’s eye in the dark. “Shepard?”

There’s no response.

He hurries to the other room, not bothering to turn on the light. It had been his insistence not to share the same room, the same bed. He figured she’d want space, a place to herself, and he stands by that, but that doesn’t help his impatience when he raps at her door now, heart in his throat as he waits for an answer.  “Shepard? Are you all right?”

Nothing. Except – he can hear something. It sounds like a rustling. Blankets? Something on the floor?

“I’m coming in,” he says cautiously, and opens the door.

A tangled duvet lies on the floor next to the bed, with a single pale leg sticking out of the bottom. The nightstand has been knocked over. Shepard’s head appears over the top of the duvet, hair mussed in its ponytail, face pale as though she’d recently awoken from a nightmare of her own. Her eyes are screwed up in pain.

Garrus swiftly but carefully untangles the blanket. Underneath, her hands are clenched around her left knee, which has swollen bright red just above where her skin meets the prosthetic. She’s still meant to take it off most nights, but he knows the comfort of feeling the weight of anything where there is nothing too well to deny her this.

“Don’t,” Shepard mutters. He’d reached for her knee to assess the damage, but looks up at her now. Her eyes are still closed. “I just – ice. Please.”

He gets ice. He hands are shaking but he gets a fresh wrap from their first-aid kit, he gets painkillers, he gets a bottle of water, and lastly he gets ice, tucked neatly in an auto-cooling washcloth. Once upstairs, he finds her sitting upright, leg stretched out against the duvet. He wills his hands to stay still. Her eyes watch him work as he carefully, carefully ices the swelling – she obviously tumbled right from the bed and broke the fall with her kneecap – and wraps her knee. Only after he’s seen her swallow down some water with two tablets of ibuprofen does he righten the nightstand.

Her voice chokes when she finally speaks again. Just after he’s helped her back into the bed is when she says “Go,” which is the last thing in the world he wants, or expects to hear at the moment.

“Shepard – ”

She looks as though she couldn’t stand without assistance, sweat on her forehead and eyes red with exhaustion or tears, but her voice is as hard as the day she’d told him to get his ass on the Normandy and not look back. “Leave it. I don’t – just go.”

She’s still avoiding his eyes.

On another night he would argue with her, but tonight, the sight of that blue blood hitting the kitchen table blinks into his vision. It’s three in the morning and he realizes it’ll be a long time before he can think of the person he once knew as his mother again without thinking of that scene instead.

Against his better judgement, he goes. In his own room with only the memory of his mother’s ghost for company, he doesn’t sleep again that night.

* * *

The second time Shepard had awoken in the hospital, he had missed it. He had been in a place called “Germany,” fringe-deep in a Reaper corpse on the edge of another human city whose name he couldn’t pronounce.

They disembarked on an abandoned, upturned parking lot. The dead Reaper was its own mountain on the terrain, but the monster’s corpse stuck out here far more than the remains would have in a place like London, surrounded by civilization and architecture. Why one was located in quiet farmland, which were normally left to ground forces such as marauders or husks, was a mystery he had been recruited to solve.

The human who had sat next to him on the flight over turned as he was stepping off the shuttle and said conversationally, “Roermond’s just across that border a ways. You know that was almost the Normandy’s name?”

Garrus started. “That so?”

“The engineers what designed it worked the schematics there,” the human said. “Alliance Council picked Normandy instead. Makes sense — one of the biggest battles in our history, or summat, till we discovered spaceflight, anyway.” The human soldier looked out at the landscape, the empty cars, the cloudless sky. “Got folks in Roermond. Woulda been nice for them.”

Garrus looked at this land again, and tried to see it with new eyes. To him, without a familiar crew by his side, it might’ve been any other planet. He’d stepped on a dozen garden worlds with breathable air and beautiful scenery. Except this was Earth, and it was home for somebody. It had been Kaidan’s; it was Vega’s; it was Shepard’s.

Three hours later, they were nearly halfway done dismantling the Reaper, and Garrus made a discovery that felt like a bucket of cold water tossed on the back of his fringe: the corpse was lying on top of the entrance to an underground bunker.

In an instant, his job shifted from stripping its machinery to clearing a path out of the corpse for survivors, were there any, to reach the surface. He attempted several biometric and life scans for life underground that bounced straight back to him. A half-hour of failed decryption, unsuccessful bypasses, and a very enthusiastic blowtorch yielded nothing. Then, finally, a salarian engineer managed to wire a timed grenade and blew off the latch to the meter-thick bunker door.

“Helmets on, everyone,” Garrus says. “And small firearms for now, but keep your rifles strapped. We don’t know what’s down there, but if it’s alive, let’s not spook it.”

Even behind oxygen masks and plated helmets, opening the latch, the smell of rotten human flesh hit their party like a gas bomb.

It was an all-too-familiar scent for Garrus, and to spare most of the humans in their company, he took charge once again. He selected a party to go down with: two turian officers, and a surprising volunteer, the human private that had sat next to him that morning — Walker, his name was.

“Contingency plans,” Walker’s voice mutters over the comm as they climb down the ladder. “Saw a few of these back in London. How many poor bastards’re scattered across Europe, trapped in old bunkers from the 1900s…”

The bunker wasn’t much of one at all: one large room, a small restroom, and a dorm, where they quickly confirmed the location of the bodies. Down here, his visor picked up no life signs whatsoever, not even an insect’s last breath. The space looked more like an evacuation area for temporary emergency relocation, if anything. But the main chamber was filled not with rations or supplies or clothing, but computers that, to Garrus’s eyes, looked several hundred years out of date. Red lights flashed quietly from every station, and a fine layer of dust coated every panel.

“ _Unidentified presence confirmed_.” A VI on the far side of the room began to flicker. “ _Initiating lockdown. Please deliver my harddrive to the nearest Systems Alliance headquarters for further use._ ”

“Dammit.” One of his fellow officers — Imoria, he thought her name was — looked around at the room full of panels and deactivated screens. “Another top-secret Alliance surprise we should worry about?”

“Not sure.” Garrus scratched his neck in thought. “Might’ve hunkered down here on orders searching for a way to defeat the Reapers. Would explain why one’s planted on top of the entrance, blocking communications…”

He broke off, wandering to one side of the panels. An older human was slumped over a keyboard, the flesh on her fingers in varying states of decay. Garrus pulled her shoulder up, slowly — out of respect, he remembered to close her eyes — and let her fall back into the chair. A nametag written in foreign human script; after a moment to work, his translator spat out: _Dr. R. Dimov_. Her other hand was still clasped around a datapad.

_We are seven members of the Crew SF-Novena, assigned to the Crucible on December 5th, 2185. We were tasked — [[[[ERROR////]] the Catalyst fails. We have had no contact with the other teams. We have [[DATA CORRUPTED]]_

_On May 18, 2186 at approx. 14:50, the Reaper you see above us discovered our position as we opened the hatch for a routine delivery. The external comm interference installed to protect this bunker from detection has been used against us. We estimate our supplies will last [[DATA CORRUPTED]]_

_The VI will enforce a lockdown the moment any outside party attempts to access our findings. Any attempts to hack the system will result in a full-scale deletion. Deliver the data on this system’s hard drive directly to the Systems Alliance Council, or in the event of their unavailability, the highest-ranking operative presently in command, regarding Project Identification Code B-21-A24. Deliver it to no one else._

_May the universe see this through without us._

_Dr. Regina Dimov_

_Project Director_

_July 6, 2186_

A little over a year ago. How many others were trapped in Earth’s bowels waiting for rescue that never came, indeed.

He pulled the stiff fingers free.

“Let’s hope this wasn’t in vain, Doctor,” he muttered.

“Could be nothing, sir.”

“Could be,” he agreed, “But let’s get it to Hackett so someone in the brass can be sure.”

It wasn’t for another six hours, when they had passed the hard drive over to an Alliance shuttle headed straight to where Hackett was presently negotiating a trade summit in Geneva, and they were climbing back into the shuttle to deliver them back to London, that he realized his omnitool had pinged while he was down in the bunker. Chakwas’s name at the top: _She’s asking for you._

It wasn’t easily forgettable, that humanity was a species with its fair share of militaristic conquests and enough Armistice Days to rival even the Hierarchy’s long and bloody history. Intelligent life had developed on Palaven sooner, certainly, but humanity had hardly been sleeping for all that time, as he’d learned quickly on the SR-1. Shepard and Williams could discuss novels and holos in the mess just as easily as they might dive into a tactical analysis of the first airborne warfare used on Earth. What the Citadel, and the rest of the galaxy — and himself, for a time — saw of humanity was largely based on their Navy’s military, political ambition, and recently disastrous attempts at colonization.

But Earth is a homeworld, and it had needed help. When Shepard asked, he came. The threat was over, and there was still work to be done, but she hadn’t asked again — hell, nobody had. He was in Germany on his own offer. Victus’s stream of requests had slowed to a trickle, and he felt no guilt or regret now recommending SAR or anti-terrorist teams more appropriately suited.

He told himself that it might as well have been Palaven. Except humanity had far fewer ex-military civilians, and even fewer capable volunteers. With work on the Citadel picking up speed, so few of his calibre were left stationed planetside. Even fewer of Shepard’s.

So he stays.

* * *

Vega is their first visitor, as soon as word gets around.

“Lola!” he hears James greet in the doorway. “Good to see you out of there.”

It’s been a week since the nightmare. Two days later, he had walked downstairs to find Shepard quietly cleaning all of his guns at the table with his breakfast already waiting for him — an apology, or a white flag — and she’s seemed determined not to speak of that night since.

Fair enough.

“You know,” Shepard’s voice says dryly, and from the kitchen, Garrus hears the shuffle of boots as she lets him in. “Just because we’re not on the SR-2 doesn’t mean ‘Lola’ is still an appropriate address for your senior officer.”

“You’ll always be my CO in my heart, Commander.”

“Captain,” Shepard insists. Garrus refrains from pointing out how she argues against the title when spoken by practically anyone else. “I know you’ve heard by now.” 

“They promoted you posthumously, then it turns out you weren’t dead. It doesn’t count anymore.”

Shepard snorts loud enough for him to hear from the kitchen, and they move into his line of sight in the living room — _drawing_ room, she insists on calling it, though Garrus isn’t sure if he’d ever understand that one. Garrus sees James has two cans each of dextro and levo beer hanging from his fingers. He drops them onto the side table.

“Ash was stationed in Rio two weeks ago,” Vega goes on, “And Joker’s stuck flying the Alliance Council to Vancouver and back, so who knows when he’ll be free. But I thought if enough of the crew’s around, we could break this place in — you know you’ve got the nicest digs of all of us?”

“Didn’t they put you in some Chelsea flat? You can’t complain.”

“Sure, but es pequeño, Lola. Can’t swing a dead cat without my elbow hitting the wall.” He deposits the alcohol on the couch side table, then spots Garrus in the kitchen, where he’s been attempting to make _one_ dextro meal that doesn’t taste like the inside of a ration can. “Spurs, how much turian whiskey should I dig up?”

“Enough to make me forget you ever started calling me that.” Garrus finally manages to turn the stove off and joins them with his lunch. “I worked hard on my scars, they haven’t gone anywhere.”

“Gotta keep a fresh cycle of nicknames, keeps things interesting.” James wanders into the kitchen, digs around a bit in a drawer, then finds what he’s looking for, a bottle opener, and cracks open two beers. Shepard waves her hand and James shrugs, putting the second aside for later.

“Who’s still around?” Shepard has sunk back into the couch. Her prosthetic leg is propped up on the footrest and her hand lingers on her knee; a silent indicator that it’s hurting more than normal.

“Me, Chakwas and Cortez obviously, most of the engineering and piloting crew, Traynor’s at a garrison in Essex but she could come around, and,” he pauses. “Not sure about most of the non-Alliance, but I think some are still on Earth, like the krogan. Jacob flew to America with Brynn. God knows where Jack and Kasumi are.” He shrugs. “And there’s Garrus, of course.”

“Where’s Javik gone off to?” Garrus asks, already halfway through his panlecta. “There was some talk about him with the hanar.”

“Citadel, I think.” James scratches his jaw, where growing stubble has begun to form. “Went to go bug the Council about giving Protheans a representative in the embassy” — Garrus snorts — “And Tali’s splitting her time between remobilizing the Fleet and recolonizing Rannoch, of course, and Liara’s still got her computers hooked to the Normandy, so she’s stuck there while it’s grounded. She said if it bothers you, she can move out.”

“Fine by me.” Shepard hesitates. “Where is the SR-2, these days?”

“Nobody told you?” James holds out the other bottle to her, a second offer, and she shakes her head more firmly. “It’s in Geneva. They’ve got some dozen engineers up to their knees in engine fluid still trying to restore it. Turns out repairs to the fuselage weren’t as complete as we thought. By all accounts we shouldn’t have made it back to our system at all. Surprise, surprise, it turns out we never should’ve let Joker oversee the repairs…”

Garrus puts his dish on the side table and begins to drift after that, head tilting against the couch. Shepard hadn’t slept well, so he had spent most of the night up with her in the living room bullshitting some old trouble he’d got up to as an ensign. Then, as she had finally drifted off, a distress signal came in the early hours of the morning when one of the elderly turian generals recovering a block over had lost his emergency dextro epinephrine. He’d appeared to be suffering a severe allergic reaction to one of the medications a human nurse had administered the previous night. After rushing over, stabilizing his blood pressure, and waiting until a Hierarchy-sanctioned med team arrived, Garrus had reached the house around noon, where Shepard had been eating lunch in the dining room, cane propped against the table.

The sight had been enough to leave him stunned for a few moments. “I could’ve made — ”

“I’m good,” Shepard had said around a mouthful of… something pale and sludge-like. “What happened? You look worse than I feel.”

“General Melanis had an emergency.” Garrus dropped into the chair next to her with a groan. “You take your — ?”

“Yes, doc, I took my meds.” She nudged a mug of kava toward him, steam so thick it looked nearly tangible, the way he liked it. “All seventeen of them.”

“If you took seventeen pills this morning,” he said around a yawn, “you did something wrong.”

She’d shaken her head and waved a fork at him, filled with something soft and yellowy at the end. “Just took the same one seventeen times. Why, is that worse?”

He dozes now in the armchair to Shepard and Vega’s light conversation, and in the half-daze of sleep he can feel his visor slipping off the end of his fringe, dripping down to brush his mandible.

His next breath of awareness brings a hand on his shoulder, and Shepard’s blurry image leaning over him.

“You want to relocate to the bed?”

“Mm,” he grunts, shifting groggily. “How long’ve…”

“An hour or so. Vega just lef — ” 

“OW!”

“Jesus! You okay?”

Teeth clenched in pain, he nods jerkily. In his move to get up, he’s shifted and unthinkingly jammed his sensitive broken spur into the wooden chair leg. It burns now as though someone had stripped the top layer of his plates off and pressed a hot poker to it. Humans and their damned low furniture —

“I’ll get the salve. Stay there.”

Garrus sinks back into the chair, lifting his leg onto the coffee table. He swears out loud this time — still doesn’t help — and gingerly rolls up his trouser leg. He wouldn’t be surprised if it’s bleeding again. The skin there has been thin since it regrew, which isn’t uncommon for broken spurs, but he’s starting to regret not taking up that offer of bone surgery when it was first offered. Solana always said his devil-may-care inclination to let his injuries heal the way fate would have it would eventually bite him in the ass —

He’s leaning down to pick up the visor that’s fallen to the floor when Shepard comes back into the room with their dextro med kit (he’d insisted to Cortez it wasn’t necessary when they first moved in, which sure shows him), limping like a woman who’s refused to use her cane for the past several weeks. She wobbles her uneasy way to the floor, sticking her prosthetic out of the way as she inspects his leg.

“Ow, Shepard, don’t _poke_ it.”

“You felt that?”

“Of course I felt it — ”

“Chakwas said your nerves go funny sometimes, after enough of a beating, they can take a while to regrow.”

“It’s been nearly eleven months. Trust me, they’re regrown. I can do this myself, you know.”

She glances up at him as she unpacks the kit, digging out the bottle of salve. “At least it’s not bleeding. You never said why you didn’t get it re-attached.”

“Shepard, the bone snapped clean off during that sprint to the beam. I couldn’t find it again if I — ” He breaks off in a hiss as the ointment stings. “Would you want to go rooting around the city for your missing fingers on the off chance they could reattach them?”

“There are all those commercials about regrowing spurs,” she continues.

“You know they’re a scam,” he hisses, partly in pain, partly annoyance at the thought of those smarmy salarian salesmen conning turian veterans who’d done their service — ” _Ah_ , okay, that’s enough.”

“All right.” She caps the bottle and opens another pocket inside the kit. “Okay, the most important decision you’ll make today. Do you want the sexy black bandage, or the bright yellow with a pyjak on it?”

“Surprise me,” he says dryly, and to his complete not-surprise, she chooses the pyjak and wraps it tenderly around his sensitive spur. His pride can manage, he thinks, if it means her grinning like this again.

Zipping up the med kit, she seems to have now run out of things to do with her hands. Instead of rolling his pant leg back down, she instead places her fingers at the base of his wounded spur, rubbing tentatively, like an insecure masseuse. Most adult turians wouldn’t feel much of anything in any massage a human would be capable of giving, himself included, but the skin down there still feels raw, hypersensitive on off days, and her fingers are cooly therapeutic. His spur has never been in enough pain to muster a complaint about, especially when she’s facing her own injuries day after day, but perhaps it was too much to presume she wouldn’t have noticed his discomfort as often as he does hers.

After a few minutes, Garrus realizes he’s been staring at the cane lying next to her knee. She’s watching him.

He nods to it. “Why don’t you like using it?”

Shepard twists her mouth in a way he’s come to realize signals uncertainty, or trepidation. “I don’t know,” she says finally. “The crutches feel temporary.”

“The cane’s temporary, too.”

“I know. I guess it’s a — we associate canes with age, you know, and immobility.” _Uselessness,_ is the unspoken word, and he nods. “I suppose it’s pride thing,” she mutters and pushes herself back to lean on her hands. “It’s stupid.”

“You should’ve seen the ones Chakwas stuck with me on the Normandy,” Garrus says. He would show them to her now, but he’d happily donated the damn things months ago. “When we were stranded after the relays went down. Apparently the Alliance only expects humans to have leg injuries. Those things nearly took off my other spur.”

“You might’ve let them,” Shepard says diplomatically. “Symmetry.”

“Har, har,” he tries to say, but he can’t help smiling back at her grin. Her wounded left hand has moved to where his lays on the armrest. With a grunt, he joins her on the floor and rubs over her small knuckles with his thumb and middle finger. Her hands and face are fuller than they were even two weeks ago, but still too thin and her skin far too pale for his comfort.

“What’s going on with Victus?” she asks suddenly.

He blinks. “Nothing? Why, did you hear something?”

“No, I meant — does he have anything for you? How long are you staying?”

Garrus looks at her steadily. It’s entirely possible she’s forgotten their earlier conversations back in the hospital, high on painkillers as she was at the time, but it’s equally likely she’s expected the Hierarchy has changed their mind, ordered him on the next ship to Trebia. “I told you. On paper I’m working light admin. I can do that anywhere. Might as well be here.”

“A step down from Reaper Advisor, surely.” The joke falls a bit flat, but he finally starts to grasp what this is all about.

“Nobody needs me back home, Shepard,” he tells her, and even as the words leave his mouth she brings her right hand up to her face, elbow on her knees. “You’re not keeping me from…” From what? From bigger opportunities? He can see in her face she doesn’t believe him.

“Garrus,” she says to her knee, eyes hidden by her hand, “I can’t sleep.”

“I know, sweetheart.”

The skin on her forehead crinkles and her voice tightens. “My port’s cold, my left foot feels like it’s walking on needles — “ _Your left foot’s gone, Shepard —_  “My head’s so fucking hot some nights, it’s this constant fever, but you say my temperature is normal. I wake up and I’m trapped under the rubble again and I can’t breathe until you come into the room. I wanted out of that hospital so badly, but I’m supposed to be getting better out here and I’m not — ”

Garrus hugs her. He dreads for a moment that she'll pull away, but she clings tighter, and in a way, that's just as hard to rationalize.

“It’s just — I was fine, you know, I'd made peace with it,” she's saying into his collar now, voice muffled. “The end.”

And then she’d woken up again in a body that didn’t feel right, and she’d lost time, and the galaxy had moved on again without her. Yeah.

“On top of all this _bullshit_.” The fingers on her left hand cling to his. Her grip strength still isn’t what it used to be.

All of the things he wants to say — _You know I don’t mind_ , or _You’d do the same for me,_ or maybe even _I love you_ — don't seem enough. Instead he says the only thing he knows she wouldn’t be able to doubt or sweep aside. 

“Nobody does it alone, Shepard.” He pauses. “The Alliance doesn’t have a gun to my head here. You know that.”

Against his carapace, he feels her huff. Her right hand comes up to the back of his crest. “I wouldn’t put it past Karin.”

This needs to get better, he thinks fiercely, this — spirits. He knows PTSD hits all soldiers hard, particularly humans. Shepard is allowed all the time she needs, but he’ll be damned if he loses her to herself. And if he needs to say this every day to prevent that, he will. “I’m where I want to be, Shepard. As long as you need me.”

“I know. I — shit. _Shit_. Sorry.” Telling her not to apologize in moments like these is as pointless as telling the city to stop raining. She leans back a bit — to his immense relief, her eyes are dry — and rubs her face again. Her forehead is still creased. “Hard to feel yourself, like this. And Vega wants a party. I just don’t know. This isn’t like me.”

He flashes back to the final vidcall he’d had with his mother back on Palaven, shared from Solana’s omnitool in the med facility on Tenipus. The salarian doctors had given her a month. He’d called to — to tell her goodbye, dreading having these last memories of her so untrue to the woman he knows, and over the line, she’d called him by his long-dead uncle’s name.

_Goodbye, Amertus. Talk next week?_

The sound of this strange, frail woman on the line, the complete antithesis to the mother he knows, calling him a dead man’s name still hasn’t left him.

They’ve won the war, and yet it’s hard to believe any of them could ever be as they were again. Maybe this is who they are now.

“I love you,” she says. It takes a moment for him to process the words. “I couldn’t tell if you — believed me, on the Presidium. This is a crap time to say it but you need to know. I meant it then. I mean it now.”

He hears what she’s trying to say instead: _Please don't leave._

Garrus puts his mouth to her crown, then tips his forehead down to hers and closes his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments on this chapter posted before April 23 2017 reflect the entire fic, as I originally posted this fic in its entirety as a one-shot.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another recommended song for this chapter: ["England" by The National](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcEwEYrWo6Q).

Upon escaping the Bahak system during what would later be referred to as the Aratoht Incident of 2185, Shepard had answered a harried Hackett’s questioning in the med bay, given the crew of the SR-2 a tense debrief, and tolerated Chakwas’s blood tests until the minute her system was declared clean of the sedatives the Project Rho staff had injected into her bloodstream. She had disappeared into the loft, during which time he hoped that she was sleeping but knew was most likely composing a formal admission of culpability to the Alliance. She had then emerged eleven hours later and set a course for Ilium in the CIC without another word on the subject.

Garrus had been… cautious is the only word for it, though he wouldn’t have called it that at the time. Too unsure of the fragility of this new angle to their relationship to invite himself to her cabin without an assurance he’d be welcome, yet too assured in the knowledge that she wasn’t half as fine as she claimed to be to convince himself a conversation _wasn’t_ necessary. And so he hadn’t sought her out at all, giving her space to recuperate.

She’d ended up looking for him, in the end. A surprise, though perhaps it shouldn’t have been.

“Suppose you were right,” her voice said from the battery entrance. He’d turned — the Thanix was out of alignment _again_ , what in the spirit of the Normandy’s name was Donnelly doing down there? — to find her looking almost normal, wearing a black and white officer’s uniform he couldn’t recall seeing before. But the skin was dark around her eyes, and she was leaning against the doorway in a way that suggested support as much as familiarity.

He eyed her warily. Following their argument days earlier over her decision to rescue Kenson alone, in the two days of silence, he had entertained himself by preparing various renditions of “What’d I tell you?” conversations — all of which had vanished from his mind the moment he’d heard her shouts from the cockpit, desperate yells for Joker to get them out of the system. 

That argument seemed so long ago, now.

“Did Chakwas clear you?” he asked.

“I’m allowed to wander my own damn ship,” she said, which meant no, and took the seat next to his tool bench with a wince. “It was — I’m just writing my letter to HQ, explaining the mission, and in the middle of realizing how avoidable it all could’ve been, it occurred to me I owe you an apology.”

“You don’t owe anybody anything,” he said sharply, “That system was doomed long before you set foot on the asteroid.”

“Maybe,” she snapped, “but the civilians who lived there? The slaves?”

“I would’ve done the exact same thing,” he shot back without heat. She watched him quietly. “It wouldn’t have made a difference with backup. You were just…” _Scapegoat_ wasn’t the right word. Neither was _tool_. She’d pushed the button, she’d made the decision. She was the only one who _could_ have made it, and he would have too, if he had been there. The only difference being that they would’ve shared the burden of guilt together; a weight he would’ve gladly carried, if it meant she didn’t have to do it alone.

Shepard rubbed a tired hand on her forehead. “There was — ” She broke off abruptly, but her hand didn’t leave her face. Covered like that, it was difficult to read her expression. “Several times down there, I thought I wasn’t making it out. It was different from the Collector base. From Sovereign.”

She’d been stranded on a hostile asteroid, trapped in a base full of soldiers and scientists alike set out to kill her, with the survival of a hundred worlds riding on her ability to stay alive long enough to push a damn button. Of course it was different. She’d been alone.

 _Vakarian, my six_ , the Commander had barked at him more than once — on Noveria, and Feros, on Virmire, and then on the newly-christened SR-2, the order had simply been implicit. He hadn’t been there this time; yet hearing the details in her debrief, he wasn’t so sure that his presence on the Kenson mission would’ve made a lick of difference anyway.

But still.

He’s of the mind that she’d been stranded too many times already. Akuze, Alchera, now Aratoht, each of them on orders, each leaving a mess of bodies behind.

 _Never again_ , he still remembers swearing to himself in the battery that day as he moved to embrace her. The day Shepard came to him for comfort, not the other way around. _This is the last time she goes it alone._

Which turned out a promise he was destined to break. _No choice_ , she’d said so much later, before dropping down into the watery abyss of Despoina by herself; she’d said it as she stepped out into space on the ruins of that monstrous geth dreadnaught alone; as she faced down a Reaper on foot on Rannoch; when she pulled rank a year ago, ordering him an evac even as he protested, even as both sets of his vocal chords had wavered and choked, “ _Shepard, I —_ ”

Even now, recalling that whole exchange feels strangely unreal; like the universe had tilted slightly on its axis for one short minute to allow them a final rushed, painful attempt at a goodbye he refused to accept. He wonders if it’d been the same for her. With the beam leading to the Crucible silhouetting her back in the distance, he could barely make out her face. What sticks with him to this day has been the sight of her matted, blood-splattered hair flying with the gusts from the Normandy’s thrusters, and he’d felt his gut clench with the revelation that she was looking at him like it was the last time she’d ever see him. Tali was on his other side, dragging him inside the shuttle bay — the pain in his leg hitting in agonizing bursts, his lower spur a mess of painful nerves and thick blood — but his head was fuzzy, and the both of them were probably concussed, which had made it even harder to wrap his senses around the fact that Shepard was looking him straight in the eyes and telling him to _leave_.

_“We’re in this ‘till the end. Dammit, I’m still good. Just give me — ”_

And then she’d been gone; from the Normandy, from the universe, from his life once again. Until two and a half months later, there was a call about an otherwise unremarkable patient transfer, and he stepped into a hospital doorway.

 _A lifetime of surprises_ , his mother had one told him, a long time ago, when he’d asked what being married was like, in the painfully common way a child’s innocent curiosity might leave adults floundering for answers. His mom never hesitated, though. That was always one thing he admired about her. She never hesitated, and she never held back the truth. _We’re a team, Garrus. Like partners, but forever. Two people who help each other be the best they can be. They make each other happy, even when the whole galaxy is sad._

Shepard has certainly fulfilled that role to bursting.

Except now there’s none of what he’s come to expect of moving within Shepard’s orbit, nothing but the rebuilding and the slow upward climb back to normality. It’s easy now, he figures, to stand here on the other side and think about how the war had been — not _easier_ , never, but the Reapers had been a clear enemy, something he could fire enough sinks at in the right places and count a victory or a loss at the end of the day. But the thing that’s crept up on him, in all this time that’s left over, is the uneasy knowledge that the last few years have made him incompatible with peacetime. A CV with his list of accomplishments as a detective, a vigilante, a war advisor, are worthless without an enemy. So far, all he’s done with it is stubbornly strand himself on a planet that isn’t equipped to sustain his biochemical makeup.

Of course, that was before storages of dextro rations were salvaged from downed ships; with casualties as high as they were, they’d found enough to last the remaining turians on Earth years, even. Long enough to establish a manageable, if not comfortable, form of — life, or whatever passes for it now, in this weird _afterward_ that nobody save the politicians seem to want to put a name to.

“There are talks about you taking a seat in Quentius’s cabinet,” Victus tells him over the comms one afternoon. The Primarch had been stationed back to Palaven as soon as the Charon relay was functional, and currently splits his time between there and the Citadel as his “temporary” ascension to Primarch is starting to look more permanent. “Nothing’s confirmed, but I thought you should know. Consider it an invitation, or a forewarning, depending on your interest.”

The rowhouse is quiet; upstairs, Shepard is napping. It occurs to him now, strangely, that not a day has passed that hasn’t seen Garrus by her bedside since he had delivered the data from the German bunker to Hackett with nothing but a cordial letter of thanks for his efforts. When she’d woken for the second time after that excursion, they’d talked. Their second reunion in the hospital, she had been able to remember up to the beam, but very little after. She’d — cried, just a bit, at the pain in her bandaged skull coupled by the overwhelming loss of her leg, and no doubt at whatever else unspoken trauma had struck her without him there to see her through. All he’d done, all he felt was right to do, was pretend not to notice, and tuck himself around her all the same.

On paper, he been granted flexible reassignment to Earth after the war. With only a third of the approved relays reestablished, travel priority had been restricted to diplomats, the highest-ranking living officers of each respective Navies — Garrus had ground his teeth on that for a while — before slowly allowing passenger ships for the wounded dextro survivors to return home, and finally, all military. It wouldn’t be a hard sell to convince Victus he needed passage to jump to the military evac base where his father and Sol had taken refuge. It might even be easier, now that the reestablished relays show no signs of sudden malfunction or collapse. Nearly eight months since the Charon relay lit up again, a bright and distant blue star somewhere past Pluto that could bring him back to Palaven, to his family, and he still hasn’t made the request.

Forwarded updates on various stations and units across turian space from Victus are waiting for him in his inbox. The man himself is watching him on the line now, expectantly. Yet Garrus doesn’t know what it says of him, that he’d turn down a position within a high-level political office, would likely turn down Spectrehood itself, if it means leaving this planet, where he’s seen Shepard die, and now tries to help her live again.

“Thank you, Primarch,” he says over the link. “But I think the situation here still needs me.”

* * *

In the wake of their homeplanet’s near-annihilation, Garrus has been surprised to observe how little the Alliance leaves their soldiers wanting for material necessities. Occasionally Cortez drops off regular rations for the both of them, though more often than not Garrus prefers to make trips to the nearest dual-chiral supply station himself down the road. And yet, like most matters with humans, the Alliance is simultaneously too much and not enough: Shepard had been forced to speak to a counselor during her time in hospital, and looked near to shoving the man’s pen up his nose at his suggestion they continue weekly appointments following her release. The eventual verdict was that a live-in housemate — himself — would be enough, and the topic hasn’t been brought up since.

(As he understands it, she had gotten along much better with the hospital’s residential therapy dog, but any attempt to question Shepard on that resulted in her changing the subject.)

Several Alliance, Hierarchy, and Union soldiers, including three admirals and seven commanding officers, have been relocated to their neighborhood post-release. Several of them are in varying stages of recovery themselves. The idea helps her, he thinks, this sort of communal post-apocalyptic whiplash. They prefer to use their time taking regular trips to the market square or down to the newly-built boating docks on the north side of the river, until her breathing grows labored or heart rate runs a little too fast — but it’s good to have the option of company. Yet it’s hard to prevent himself from wondering, sometimes, if she and her fellow commanding officers haven’t been given houses and food and comforts simply because their respective governments have no worldly idea what to do with them now.

But after four long weeks of recovery, when his trigger finger begins to itch and a slow but significantly stronger Shepard begins disappearing to the roof for workouts (“Pilates,” she says, but she avoids his eyes and carries a faint scent of tobacco every time), he borrows the skycar from the salarian STG agent down the street, and brings them to Canary Wharf, where a Reaper capital ship lies trapped between the docks and a subway station. Its legs lay flattened, some detached entirely, and its dead form somehow seems unnervingly _fitting_ here, as though it’s become part of the landscape as much as the buildings next to it.

They take competitive shots at its empty black eyes.

“How’d it get stuck there?” Shepard asks during a break. Her grip is better but what cheers him up the most is the sight of her holding the rifle steady, even if she has to put it down between rounds.

“They ordered an evac of the area and triggered the supports of those — ” He gestures to the two toppled buildings currently crushing the Reaper to the ground. “ — to fall. I think their plan was to get it trapped, then a team close in and figure out how to disable the laser.”

“Would’ve been handy to know,” Shepard says. They’re standing on the flat side of a collapsed concrete pane too large to move and too heavy to break down for repurposing. She’s leaning heavily on her cane and eying the ground in front of the corpse. A long, jagged trail of debris digs through concrete and the sidewalk on their left, as if a giant had taken an obelisk and drawn a line in the ground. “I’m guessing it didn’t work.”

Garrus shakes his head. “Hive mind. Husks and Marauders swarmed front and back, nobody got close enough. And it still had the cannon.” Even if they succeeded, they couldn’t have relied on manually disabling every Reaper beam they came across, but he’s long used to keeping thoughts like those to himself. After the fighting is over, nobody wants to think about what they _should_ have done, yet he finds this is where his mind goes every time: he should have stayed with Shepard, should have learned to duck when the Mako came hurtling toward his head. He knows it doesn’t matter now. Still.

Shepard nods at his explanation, still eying the path of destruction the cannon had made, trailing to the front of the corpse like an invitation; then suddenly she drops the cane, raises her Viper, and fires twice in succession. The first shot misses by about half a foot, but the second shot cracks the eye. The sound of thick glass shatters from a distance; they watch something glitter and fall from the eye, skitting against the steel plating until it hits the top of the debris field underneath.

“Odd, that this area isn’t flooded,” she says. “It’s trapped by the river on two sides.”

“Mm,” he says. “Nice try.”

“I’m sorry?”

“My vision is as good as ever. Don’t think I don’t recognize that targeting mod strapped to the front of your scope when I see it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We said no mods. Unless that new eye of yours come preinstalled with a military-grade auto-targeting amp?”

“Look, I’m at a disadvantage on two counts here. Half of my sight is gone — ”

“ _Was_ gone — ”

“And that ridiculous Mantis is heavier than than my body weight, otherwise I’d take it and mop the floor with you.”

“Jealousy doesn’t suit you, Shepard,” he says, and lifts said ridiculous Mantis with ease, firing a single shot into the Reaper’s remaining eye. He smirks at the resounding _CRACK_. “If you’d like some easier targets, there’s a bridge over there that might stand still if you ask nicely.”

“Fuck off,” she mutters, and sinks a shot into the front face of the Reaper; about where the forehead might be. It doesn’t leave a mark. “Okay. Whoever doesn’t hit all the leg joints in the next two seconds is making dinner.”

Garrus lets her win that one. Shepard’s cooking is downright atrocious.

* * *

It’s the fifth week following Shepard’s release from the hospital that Garrus decides, as soon as she makes it up and down the stairs without needing to break and her sleep schedule has remained free of nightmares for days, that they’re both long overdue to partake in some good, old-fashioned tourist garbage.

“The Globe,” she repeats one morning over coffee. Her eyes flick up to meet his over her datapad. Garrus has his arm stretched out to her, omnitool displaying a picture he managed to dig up from an old site of the building pictured, pre-war. “It — you know it’s likely gone, now. It wasn’t even the original building, that one burned down ages ago.”

“Sure, but it’s famous,” he says. The only stable extranet access points these days are those locally connected; as a result, he has heard far too little of Cipritine’s latest rebuilding efforts, and read far too much on Earth news, featuring thrilling topics such as the northern hemisphere’s changing weather patterns and recent efforts at reviving an annual feet-ball sporting competition. Among them has been a recent fuss over someone called a “queen” returning to England — he’s unsure if it’s a literal monarch, local celebrity, or a nickname for a famous artist, and at this point he is frankly too embarrassed to ask for clarification. If it’s the former, then he considers his goal at keeping her actively disengaged from anything resembling politics or the press a noble one.

“It belonged to that guy who wrote the plays,” he says now. It’s one of those complicated human names he tries to avoid saying if he can.

“Shakespeare.” She shakes her head, but he can tell she’s smiling. “Yeah, a lot of famous writers worked around here. They used to have these blue signs up on old houses, to tell tourists who lived where. I’m sure there are some virtual tour programs you can pirate from the extranet if you’re really interested.”

“Why would I want a VI guide when I have you?”

Shepard doesn’t — flinch, exactly, but it’s a near thing. Her mug pauses halfway to her mouth and her mouth moves like something has caught in her throat. “Not sure I’ll be all that helpful. If you want colorful commentary, Zaeed might oblige you.”

Garrus considers himself a fair shot better than most turians at reading humans, but sometimes Shepard purposefully masks her own expressions. After their time spent with Cerberus, he thinks she does it subconsciously. Now, she has a look that he hasn’t seen in a while; it’s not quite the same “ _I’m fine_ ” mask that he’s seen in the hospital recently, but closer to the “ _it’s nothing_ ” look she’d adopted during the war.

The war, where they’d been battling politics and Reaper forces on all sides, occasionally struck by the death of an ally. Garrus has had difficulty letting himself believe it sometimes, but from the moment he’d seen Shepard lying on that hospital bed after two months of losing hope, he finds he’s been slowly approaching the feeling of true, genuine relief buried underneath the layers of shock and loss. It’s certainly a long way from happy, but he can say “fine” and mean it — yet he knows it will be some time before Shepard can do the same.

“Shepard is from south of the Thames, I think,” Traynor had mused with him over drinks, just days before Shepard’s release. “Have you been down there yet? It’s where she met Anderson, I heard… She still uses local jargon, but sometimes I forget because her accent’s long gone. Must be weird for her, being back.”

“Aren’t you from here too?” he’d asked, surprised.

“Me? I studied in Oxford. Though everyone past the Sol System does tend to assume being English is synonymous with Londoner. I guess I do sound posh on Earth.” She paused.

“Something wrong?”

“No, I just — Britain was hit hard, you know? And all of our planetside forces were brought back here as soon as they started to circle London. I just realized how many accents may go extinct on Earth.” She shook her dark head. “That’s a stupid thing to be sorry for. There are more important things. It’s just — weird.”

They’d sat in silence for a few moments, a phenomenon that was becoming uncomfortably common, even with those he had served with aboard the Normandy. Calculating losses, he supposes, or just taking a minute to breathe and relax. After a lifetime’s worth of fighting for the opportunity to _live,_ surviving long enough to try it still seems unreal.

“All I wanted was to see was my home, once the relays were restored,” Traynor continued. “Odd. I haven’t been there since I was 17, but I wanted to see if it — you know. Then I realized, maybe I didn’t want to. Maybe it makes it harder, with a place you know. To see your home like this.”

Garrus did know. He gets regular, if infrequent, feeds of Cipritine: choppy vids, clipped and informative Hierarchy reports featuring numbers and statistics. What’s there is enough to make him wonder if he’d ever even want to go home again, yet in the silence between the updates, he waits for information like a pet varren for scraps at the table. But to be ordered on enforced leave in what remained of his hometown, and cautioned not to help or depart — he can’t say for certain he would react well at all.

“Well,” he says to Shepard now over the kitchen table, digging into his reserves of humor to lighten the conversation, “a VI would also lecture me the dangers of bringing a Mantis into the Bridge of London — ”

“Tower Bridge,” she corrects.

“ — and I doubt they programmed tours of the best bars in the city.”

“You’d be surprised,” she smirks, and she turns back to her datapad — dammit — “there are tons of famous pubs around here. Why, are you really desperate to see Big Ben or something? It's a giant clock.”

“Shepard.” His subvocals drop to a low purr, the way he knows she likes, and he leans onto the table across from her. She glances up again, looking faintly amused, and maybe he’s laying it on a little thick, but then she’s hardly one to lecture _him_ about subtle propositioning. “ _Sweetie_ — ” At that, she laughs, and he grins again: “Maybe I’m asking you on a second date.”

Shepard stares, then after a moment, heaves an exasperated sigh and starts to gets up, grabbing her cane. He’s relieved to see her movements are more fluid than they were even a week ago, and long past pained grimaces or tender steps with the cane’s assistance. “All right, pal. But I choose where we’re going on our third.”

* * *

Garrus has read online that the theatre that stands on the south bank of the River Thames — or at least the building’s namesake — has survived a fire, a demolishing, and nearly six hundred years of legacy. It has not, it turns out, survived the Reapers.

They’re staring up at what remains. Garrus is more bothered by the destruction of a simple rotunda than he thought he would’ve been; somehow knowing how it had once looked, with the simple white panels and neat thatched roof, before seeing the rubble it is now, affects him more than the ruins of Trafalgar Square and the damaged palace that sits in the heart of the city.

Even the most anti-human species across the galaxy know Shakespeare.

“They’ll probably rebuild it again,” Shepard says calmly beside him. She seems oddly… nonchalant about the whole thing.

“What makes you think so?”

“Well, you know it was the third one?” She digs the bottom of her cane into the grooves of an overturned cobblestone. They’re standing on a dry patch of land on the sidewalk, raised above sea level, with the stairs leading down to the road in front of them flooded with murky river water. Behind them past the railing stands the hastily-established flood barrier, keeping the river from sweeping them away. “I’m sure the architectural plans are on the 'net somewhere. Eventually someone with enough money and resources will clean all this up and build a fourth. Probably within our lifetime, even. They rebuilt the Statue of Liberty in the States.”

He knows that name. “The — that’s in New…” New something. “Already?”

“New York. Yeah. I mean, no — it was destroyed by terrorists in the Second American Revolution, and then they just… made a new one, in like, two years. They put the original head in a museum somewhere.” She pauses. “Until Hock got to it, I suppose. I guess we do that a lot.”

“Steal each other’s monuments?”

“Rebuild,” she sighs.

Garrus looks back to the ruined building. The sight is somewhat overshadowed by a large Reaper corpse that had collapsed into a wide building directly behind the theatre. From what he can tell, the main structure of the Globe remains largely upright, but now tilts almost entirely inward, where it looks like a shuttle had crashed — or been shot down — into one side and exited through the other. The edge of the water looks about a meter deep against the wall in some areas, no doubt soaking what remains of the supports. Several empty flagpoles stick up from the top of the rubble near the collapsed front entrance; a single flag is still attached to one of them, the bottom edge flapping with the occasional breeze. Caught against a roof shingle, but still attached. Flags are a bit of an archaic concept for turians, with a majority of his species demonstrating local or national pride with badges, or digitally reproducible emblems aboard storefronts or public buildings. Still, the notion that humans’ physical symbols of pride, of their perseverance, could be demolished so easily, strikes a chord within him.

Thirty years ago, certain facets of the Hierarchy would have celebrated seeing Earth like this. The realization is… uncomfortable, to say the least.

“It’s just — unsettling,” he says. “All that history.”

Shepard is quiet for a moment. “You want to talk about Palaven?”

He sighs. Back on the Normandy, Garrus had heard from his father that his childhood neighborhood, so close to Cipritine’s center district, was in chaos as his father and Solana had escaped. He’d grown up in a historical area, on some of its oldest settled land, as the city boasted on tours and visitors’ websites. As a kid, he’d contextualized this to give significance to things he understood at that age: the souvenir spacecraft toys sold in mall kiosks modeled after those that had first founded his colony, and the statues of the war generals in his local park that had defended his ancestors.

All of it, gone. How many times has this happened? Are they standing on the graveyards of former civilizations, ones they’d never hear of, ones that the Reapers had destroyed eons ago? How much has been lost that they don’t know about?

And how much of his clan has survived? He’s hit with the unsettling realization that he had never thought to check. It had taken so much out of him on the Normandy just to keep tabs on his father and sister, and communication has only grown more difficult — but after all this time, does he have no grief left for the spirit of the community he’d left behind?

Not a good turian. Some part of him, buried but never forgotten, is struck by the shame of it again.

Shepard takes his hand, accepting his silence as an answer. He glances down; five fingers in his three, fitting so neatly after such short a time they’ve known each other. He has the sense she might understand his thoughts without him needing to give them voice. He isn’t the only one who’s left a home behind, who also struggles with attachments to places instead of people.

It’s a strange revelation, that he intended to stay to help her heal, without realizing how much he was in need of the same.

Garrus squeezes back. Her hand is so much warmer now than when he’d first grasped it back in that hospital room, desperate for a pulse or a blink, some sign of life. His most desperate hopes and worst fears reawoke that day, one side of him waiting for her to open her eyes, the other holding breath for the monitor to flatline.

No longer. Full recovery, the both of them. A vague _eventually_ , in her case. And yet, until the Alliance and Hierarchy have need of them again, or perhaps until that fantastical talk of retiring and home-settling becomes its own improbable reality, what to do with the time in between has him completely at a loss.

Shepard is real. His family, his crew, his people, are alive, and this is a victory. Perhaps one day it’ll feel like it.

* * *

It seems a shame to waste what is turning out to be a relatively bright day, and so Shepard leads him east, where flood lightens, and then disappears altogether, leaving only washed-up garbage and the leftover destruction typical of a post-Reaper invasion. Garrus has spent nearly a year in the area and still hasn’t visited all of the boroughs but he has learned from experience that London is a clashing blend of the modern and the ancient, a sprawling map of angles and alleys, and the district of Southwark is one of its worst examples. Roads that shouldn’t meet connect to form main streets and occasional cobblestone breaks off into concrete or razor-thin pathways. What might have been controlled chaos at one point, however, has only been made worse by the flood and the Reapers.

Garrus is surprised to see the local efforts at rebuilding south of the Thames are stronger than he’d previously thought. Shepard leads him through wide plazas dotted with debris, under a tram bridge, and past never-ending rows of ransacked brick-laid storefronts. She points out faded red and silver bridges, historic for reasons she claims she can’t remember, and whistles at the top half of what appears to be a giant wheel, the bottom half submerged in the water from the river. They walk several blocks without seeing people, but upon turning a random corner, they are occasionally greeted by the sight of a tented walk-in clinic, an active construction zone, or rarely, an contained open-air market. Mostly humans, many wounded, but he sees nearly all are active as they barter and reunite and try to restore the salvageable shreds of their home.

They don’t avoid these congested streets, but neither do they seek them out. He twice drags Shepard away from investigating abandoned pubs once he realizes her ulterior intentions (“I just want to see if the taps still work.” “Not that I disagree, but Chakwas strictly said no alcohol.”). As it turns out, Shepard’s idea of _tour_ mostly consists of strolling the maze of sparsely populated streets and answering his questions with “It’s an old tower,” and “That place had crap Indian food,” and “I didn’t know this area well, but there was a dealer we used to do business with around here.”

“Good thing we got you out of the house,” Garrus says dryly. “I’d miss out on this fascinating commentary.”

“You insisted,” she replies, stepping around an ancient wooden desk left in the middle of the street. Though she’s still a slow walker, her footsteps are steadier today, and he carries the cane over one shoulder. “Mm. What are the odds the skycar is going to be missing by the time we get back?”

“High to extremely likely.”

“Wait,” she says suddenly. “I know this street. There was a grocery store I used to hang out in… Over here.”

Garrus is halfway through parsing the meaning of “hanging out in a grocery store” before he’s distracted by her quicker strides. He moves faster to keep up.

“The owners were from Hong Kong.” She leads him down a street they haven’t yet traveled. The roads are wider here, and she walks in the middle of the boulevard, next to the long-dead vegetation that had once grown decoratively in the middle of the road. “Xinyi managed the market and her husband cooked in the back. They’d trade me sometimes, I’d bag groceries for potstickers.”

She trails off as they approach a large, rusting chain link fence hooked around the edges of a weathered building. A neon yellow sign on the front of the gate, translated through his visor, warns visitors away from the area while it remains under construction. Behind the fence stands a weathered cast-iron building that stretches the length of the block. Any signs or identifying features have been long removed or faded from the water and ruin, but he imagines the five stories above look vaguely like apartments, uniform in their graying walls and rows of dark square windows. On the ground level sits a single door surrounded by large, empty windows, with blocks of wood and white paneling preventing eyes from prying inside.

Garrus turns to her, and blinks. Shepard is watching the front door through the fence with a look like a — like a child looking to the door for a parent to come home, like the last stranger waiting for a loved one at the luggage terminal.

“Shepard?”

“Sorry.” She snaps out of it. “It’s been a long time.”

Garrus glances left and right. This street is empty save for them.

After a moment of consideration, he reaches into the grooves of the fence, moving awkwardly upward. Turians weren’t meant for climbing; he’s sure he makes an interesting sight from the ground.

“Going anywhere in particular?” her voice calls out behind him.

“You promised me a tour, as I recall,” he grunts. He’s nearing the top; it’s fortunately not a tall fence for someone his height. “That’s what I’m getting.”

“You’re going to have your entire race banned from Greater London because you have no impulse control.” 

“I’m a tourist, Shepard. I don’t know any better.”

“You’re also a former cop, you should be setting an example for your fellow — Jesus!” She breaks into laughter as he disables the winking security alarm at the top of the fence and jumps back to the ground. He opens his tool to begin bypassing the ancient locks, smirking at her look.

“Just don’t let anyone see you do that.”

“I’m sure the rats won’t mind if we have a look around.” With that, he swings the gate wide open, and steps up to the shieldless, simply windowed front door. A slight breeze picks up an old paper clipping, advertising what looks like an ancient sale on produce, and it flies from underneath the door as he pulls it open. The door swings open with the faintest touch, creaking against its bolts. It had been a surprise, to say the least, learning that such a major human city still used bolted doors, but he’d come to understand that there is a deep respect for tradition and long gone history here that makes humans keep remnants of London as it used to be, even occasionally at the sake of expedition and functionality. The spiky medieval architecture to the rusted red “phone booths” planted on every street corner — clunky, ineffective, and practically primitive in these times, but he understands. He doesn’t entirely relate, but he understands.

“Cor.” Shepard has stepped up next to him and she leans into the doorway. The lighting is dim inside; he illuminates the far opposite wall with his omnitool, a single bright light between the rows of empty shelves. “It really looks the same. I mean, aside from the… lack of people, and looted store and everything… Xinyi used to sit behind here and complain about my haircut while she clipped coupons. Said no self-respecting Chinese girl would have a tattoo on her head.”

She leans over the counter next to an odd machine that might be an old human computer, fiddling with what looks like a squishy desk toy, but Garrus is stuck on one thing.

“You have a tattoo on your head?” He files this trivia away for later use. “Worse than Jack’s?”

“I grew my hair out to enlist,” she responds, pointedly not answering his question. “No recruiter would take a girl advertising gang tattoos on her skull.” Shepard runs a hair over her hair, near the back of her right ear. “They might not be there anymore. Miranda probably wouldn’t’ve thought them worth bringing back.”

“They had to do surgery last year,” Garrus mentions cautiously. “So they shaved a bit — on the back, and grew some skin grafts for your skull fracture.”

“Yeah.” Her hand drops. “Long gone now.” Shepard looks at him, and his face must give away his discomfort, because she nudges his elbow with the back of her hand. “Hey. No big deal.”

“We don’t need to revisit old ghosts, Shepard.”

She looks out at the store again, the abandoned aisles, and he wonders what she sees. “Nobody to hear it but you and me.”

Garrus is far past ready to leave, uncertain now if his decision to hack the gate was a good one, but Shepard appears to have found a new inspiration in the abandoned deli, so he watches her wander throughout the store. He wonders if this is what she needs, if this is closure in some way that he’s been incapable of providing. It doesn’t matter, Garrus decides now, where she finds her peace of mind; just so long that she believes it’s achievable at all. She had helped him find peace with Saleon, with Sidonis, and in a way, with his family, even if she hadn’t known it. He owes her this.

A few aisles over, Shepard’s voice rings out in the silence: “Did you say something?”

Garrus lifts his head. “No.”

“Sorry. Damn ear’s on the fritz.” Her new implants, after an eardrum had been repaired, had restored her hearing — almost too well, depending on whom he asked. When visiting her in the hospital, she had occasionally greeted him with a piece of gossip she had overheard from two rooms over. 

“I’ll have a look later,” he says. I’ve been meaning to — ”

“ _Calibrate_ it?”

“You’re hilarious,” he says dryly, “but yes, in fact I have. If you can sit still long enough, I might even be able to install the upgrade for turian subvocal frequencies — ”

“Then I won’t get to make fun of all the sounds you make that don’t translate.”

Amidst the rows of dusty shelves, Garrus finds a single package: some sort of smushed candied food (chocolate?) wrapped in plastic, about the size of his palm. By the dust marks, it had likely fallen out of a larger box in someone’s haste to vacate the area. “Found a snack.”

“Christ,” she laughs. Her voice is a bit farther away now, behind a wall around the back of the shop. “Don’t even think about opening it. I don’t think there’s a dextro vaccine for botu — ” She breaks off in a small gasp.

“Shepard?”

“I’m good.”

It’s not pained, but with the break of her voice, it’s not a platitude he’s willing to dismiss.

He maneuvers around the maze of shelves to find her in the back of the deli, staring at a small closet underneath the water boiler. Dust and the feces of small mammals are all that remains on the tile now, but Shepard is staring at the ground with rapt interest.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she says. There’s a beat, and she continues in a rush: “I forgot. I spent the night here once, after lockup.”

Garrus watches her very carefully, resolved to follow her lead here. This treads further into the uncharted territory of her past than he’d ever stepped before. Discussing her pre-service history has always felt a bit like navigating a minefield: not out of fear of how she might react, but out of concern for what he might discover.

He’s coward enough, most days, to let her keep her silence, even on rare instances when his curiosity wants to speak up. Most days, as far as he’s concerned, he knows everything he needs to about the woman that Shepard is now. There’s hardly any need for him to pry into her history if she isn’t willing to share.

 _You climbed the gate_ , something inside reminds him. _You listen to her now._

“They were nice, you know?” She rubs the wooden doorframe with her left hand. “But they could barely take care of themselves, much less some kid that was getting involved with the Reds. A couple weeks later I had my initiation, anyway, and they didn’t let me come back after that. No gang activity around here, and a lot of people wanted to keep it that way. I got that.”

Garrus tries, lamely, “Must’ve been hard.”

She looks up at him, squeezing one corner of her mouth in a way that he’s learned means she’s either thinking deeply, or come round to resign herself to something. “I was only in it for the money, then I swore I was out. And they took care of me, the Reds, so long as I earned my share. It was — ” She snorts. “It wasn’t like it is now. Apparently they turned pro-human some time after I left.” A pause. “Doubt they’re around anymore. Can’t say I miss them either way.”

He puts a hand on her shoulder. “Want to get out of here?”

“In a minute,” she says, “I want to — ”

“Hello?” comes a voice at the front.

Garrus unholsters his Carnifex. Beside him, Shepard has her sidearm out, aimed steadily back the way they’d come.

“Is someone there?” it says again. Female, human, perhaps middle age. Inquisitive, nonaggressive. There are shadows moving in the front of the deli against the daylight from the front door.

Garrus shares a look with Shepard. Two armed, ex-military individuals entering an abandoned convenience store is hardly a crime, but the gate had supposedly been locked for a reason, and his omnitool will provide a history of the bypass.

“We’re coming out,” Shepard says in the silence that follows. “Don’t be alarmed.”

The speaker is an older woman leaning into the front door, with a large — definitely a dog, Garrus thinks, standing next to her. That’s a _large_ dog.

“This area is dangerous,” she says immediately upon seeing them, apparently not bothered by the sight of their firearms, or a strange turian accompanying a limping human in an abandoned neighborhood. The dog, however, steps forward and begins to sniff at his feet. “This block has been declared an uninhabitable zone, the supports are unstable after the war. You need to come out right away.”

“We’re coming,” Shepard grunts. “Down, boy.”

The woman whistles at the dog, a sound that leaves Garrus’s translator buzzing in confusion, and the beast leaves his boots alone to trot back to her side and paw at her jeans. “Did you hack any other gates around here?”

“No,” Garrus says honestly. “I can reset the one in the front if you need me to.”

“That — well, I’m probably not supposed to,” she sighs and motions for them to follow her outside, “but you didn’t trigger the alarm, so I suppose if you reset it, nobody’s the wiser. Thanks for coming without a fight, by the way. I’ve had to chase loons out of old schools and the like for months. Wannabe hoodlums starting new gangs, and all.”

From this angle as she walks, Garrus recognizes Predator a strapped to her waist. It explains her lack of surprise at their weaponry, to be sure. “Apologies,” Garrus says smoothly as they reach the gate. The sky outside has grayed a bit while they were inside, a typical prelude to eventual rain. “We were just visiting. We’ll return what we’ve stolen.”

Shepard elbows him in the side. Her elbow, fortunately, misses his waist and only knocks harmlessly against his armor.

“Appreciate it,” the woman says dryly as they reach the street. Garrus closes the gate and opens his tool, raising his left arm high to catch the signal for the lock before running a new set of encryptions.

“Don’t see a lot of turians in Southwark,” the woman says conversationally from below. She pronounces it like Shepard does, _Su-vurk_.

“He’s with me,” Shepard tells her. “Tour of the area.”

“You local?” Apparently she hasn’t recognized them.

“I, er, used to live here. I moved off planet some years ago.”

“Ah. Never left the island meself.”

They chat as he works, during which time he learns that the woman is a vendor in a “borough market,” running a stall daily that had passed down her family for nearly a century. Until the war hit, of course, and then she wasn’t a civilian, but just another target for robbers and looters.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Shepard says as he climbs back down. The dog, perhaps sensing weakness, pounces onto his chest, attempting to sniff his face. On its hind legs, its paws only reach to the edge of his carapace, but its breath is strong enough to have him reeling back.

“You get used to it, in a way,” the stranger says. “When you grow up like that. S’pose the guns and violence’re all you really know. Still a right shame. I grew up watching those lads on their mums’ knees, now I’m digging their graves. You said you were from here, love? You’ve lost your accent.”

“Oh — ” Shepard looks startled. “I grew up across the east coast. My family moved a lot before they settled here. This was their old store, actually — I just, er, wanted to have a poke about. Then we relocated to Bekenstein.”

“You sound like a proper yank now.” The woman wags a finger in her face, but she’s smiling. To him, she says, “Thank you, son.”

“I upgraded the shields,” Garrus says, prying the dog’s attention away from his one and only intact spur. “It won’t stop a determined hacker but it’ll be enough to deter your average looter. Can I ask, why all the security?”

“They’re isolating streets for demolition,” she says, waving a hand. “Gonna rebuild most of the neighborhood.”

“That’s a shame,” Shepard says, to Garrus’s surprise. At his look, she explains, “A lot of the buildings here have been around for centuries.”

“Mm. Unavoidable, with those things lying about everywhere.” The stranger digs her fingers firmly into the scruff of the dog’s neck, dragging him away from the where he had been attempting to climb the fence. “But this city was doomed since that cunt Shepard put a target on our back.”

It takes Garrus a monumental effort not to glance at the woman herself, who has frozen beside him. “Not a fan?” He goes for mild disinterest.

“Anderson and Shepard were both from London,” Shepard says, a bit too casually for his ears, though the woman is distracted enough with the dog to notice. “It’s common knowledge. I suppose London was an easy target for the Reapers, after Vancouver and Rio.” Shepard looks at her new fingers, pulls at the joints a bit with her other hand. “The Alliance put humanity in danger of extinction on Earth, ignoring this so long.”

“No more than the Hierarchy for Palaven,” Garrus says, but privately he’s forced to concede the point. When he’d returned to Cipritine, his warnings had at least reached the right ears, thanks to his father. He doesn't know how many lives their preparations might have saved, if any at all. Yet for all Shepard’s efforts, even with Anderson and Hackett’s support, she might as well have been shouting at a brick wall when she returned to Earth to face trial.

“And look where it got them,” the woman says, hands on her hips, looking up at him. “Your planet’s just the same. You’re military, right? All the alien types that come by are nowadays.”

“I am,” Garrus says. “Though that reminds me. They’ll be waiting for me to check into my squadron this afternoon. We should head back.”

Shepard takes his cue and nods her farewell, giving the dog one last scratch around the ears. “Take care, ma’am.”

“Stay safe, then,” she grunts. “C’mon, boy.”

Without speaking, they begin heading back west, to the empty lot where he’d parked the car. Fatigue is beginning to settle and the darkening sky rumbles distantly, threatening rain.

Garrus doesn’t think he’ll ever be used to how humans react to conflict. Shepard could have saved eighty, ninety, ninety-nine percent of the galaxy, and there would still be naysayers and activists reminding her to feel guilty about those small few that had been lost.

Ruthless calculus. Sometimes he’s less proud of it than others. Perhaps the turian “one man left standing” philosophy is as hard for him to shake as Shepard’s self-imposed save-everyone-or-die-trying methodology. It wasn’t something he’d ever considered viable or even a productive use of time when he’d first joined the Normandy — yet the results, or perhaps it was just Shepard’s touch, were undeniable at the end of the Collector mission. No casualties. On a _suicide mission_.

She hadn’t made any such promises when the Reapers hit. It had been hard to even know where to begin estimating their chances, in the first few months. And then he’d been hit with the sight of Shepard on Menae — alive, and fighting, and with the Normandy in tow — and suddenly the odds, while numerically unchanged, seemed indescribably tilted in their favor.

Not for the first time, he thinks about how a race of non-combatants couldn’t understand that, how just the mere sight of a trusted commanding officer, how a single brutal, encouraging voice can turn an entire battle around. Every turian of legal age knows the trust and respect expected of them to their senior officer, even if they never need to test it in battle. Which is why he expects, if Shepard were to ever visit Palaven, Shepard would see far more turians saluting her on the streets than she would humans on Earth. Her guilt over the lost, however momentous, would come second to the fact that she and they were alive enough to feel it, that there was still civilization enough to respect and reward her name.

He knows she’ll never see it that way.

Shepard stumbles with a sharp gasp and the cane falls to the ground. No longer lost in thought, Garrus immediately bends down to her.

“Knee,” she says quietly, and Garrus knows her tone enough to tell she’s biting back genuine pain. Her brow is furrowed; one hand is clasped at her reinforced cap, the other at the prosthetic port just an inch below it.

“You’re not walking back,” Garrus says. He means it as a frank statement of the seriousness of the injury, but from the tightened look on her face, she takes it as an order. “Shepard — ”

“Fine.” She sticks out an arm for him to take over his shoulders. “Let’s go, then.”

He grabs her cane, and wants to say something — about that woman, about how grateful everyone really is, how grateful they _should_ be — but he knows how welcome that conversation would be. Instead, Garrus scans the area for the closest bench, hunches down to take her arm over his crest, and begins moving them slowly toward a gated area of the park that looks like a child’s playground. Shepard clearly deems the benches on the opposite side of the gate too far; instead she directs him awkwardly to the center of the playground. She slowly sits onto an odd, thin metal plank suspended from two rusted chains with a sigh of relief.

Garrus kneels, and without a word between them, he rolls up her pant leg and gets to work on a temporary solution to her knee.

He doesn’t have his tools on hand, but there are still a few things he can accomplish without them. Shepard is quiet as he loosens the bolts connecting her prosthetic to her stump, just below the knee, and shifts the top calf-plate looser so the friction is hopefully less severe to accommodate any new swelling. The last time he had done this, that morning after his own nightmare, they had done so in complete silence out of tension and awkwardness. But she knows better now, so she answers his questions when asked (“Too tight?” “A little… That’s fine.”). It’ll have to be good enough until they get her to Chakwas; they both know two rough tumbles with a fragile knee automatically means an overdue visit.

When he’s done, he leaves her pant leg rolled and stands back.

“Thanks,” she says quietly.

Shepard pushes gently at the ground with her other foot, drawing the seat back, and releases, letting it sway forward and back. Her prosthetic hangs just barely off the ground.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never been on a swing, Garrus.”

He blinks and looks down at the other plank hanging next to her by a few feet. “That’s what this is called?” The seat moves back and forth with her movements, the chainlink cords holding tight. “We have something similar on our playgrounds.” Except they’re used more as balancing exercises for children than fun or recreational sport. There doesn’t seem to be any other functions to this other than the steady, rhythmic back-and-forth.

Shepard gestures at the seat next to her, and Garrus, after pausing to wonder if it will take his weight, decides that anything that could survive the Reapers could survive him, and takes it. Immediately it wobbles backwards and he nearly loses his balance; on his right, Shepard’s snorting, but he sticks his heels into the mulch and resettles, adjusting his weight forward.

There’s a bit of quiet and Garrus adjusts. Then Shepard says, quite loudly:

“Fuck this planet.”

There’s no polite way to agree or disagree, so Garrus just huffs a breath.

“You sure this thing will hold us?” he asks after a minute. “Pretty sure it’s made for children. Actually — ”

“If you make one more jab about my size, I swear — ”

“ _Actually_ , I was going to say it looks like a kid’s used it recently.” He points around her to the third swing, where a recently opened children’s juice box sits steady in the center of the seat, as though someone has simply left it to return later. “Insects would’ve had at it by now, but the container still looks half full.”

Shepard’s quiet for a moment, observing it. Faced like this, he can only see the back of her dark head, but he knows her mind has gone somewhere else, perhaps back toward her own childhood, where public playgrounds would have been a popular locale for any lost kid looking for familiar, comforting scenery. Or a desperate parent might come back, searching for a child they’d lost sight of.

“I used to sleep in those kinds of slides,” Shepard says suddenly, jutting her chin at the children’s play set a few meters away. Next to a jungle gym is a large, plastic, bright red tube that spirals down twice before exiting out at a black safety mat that has seen better days. She moves sideways to face him, then slowly, with her good foot, she continues turning around until the cords above her head begin to twist in an interlocking pattern. “One morning a toddler came crashing down over my head. I realized I needed something more… permanent. Wandered into a shelter the next day.”

Garrus says nothing. He’s been doing a lot of that lately, but the thought of interrupting is impossible.

The sky rumbles distantly; Garrus glances left, to the graying sky rolling in. He guesses they might have an hour before a sun shower might reach them.

Shepard stops twirling the swing. “Sorry,” she says suddenly, and laughs. “I’m pretty fucking melancholy today, aren’t I?””

“Arguably my fault,” Garrus says easily. “This was my idea.”

“No, this was good. I’m going crazy locked up in that house.” Shepard glares down at her left leg and digs into the area around her knee with her fingers. “Being back here. It's just the strangest bloody thing. It’s also — ” She stops, rotating back and forth a bit on the swing, twisting the cords tighter, then looser. “I guess it’s also that I’m thinking about what you said. What we’ll do after. And how we might — get there.”

He’s said a lot of things, but he can’t ever remember talking to her about an after. After what? The Reapers? Or —

Oh.

“That was… I meant — ”

“I’ve thought about leaving the Alliance for a while,” she interrupts, startling him out of his panic. “I joined for — security, you know. Free meals.” She tries to smile, but it turns out a bit more like a grimace. “I didn’t really have a long-term goal. Certainly never expected to make it to Commander, much less N7. Or bloody Spectre. I guess someone like… Anderson comes along, and believes in you, and suddenly you want to do more. Prove they put their faith in the right person.”

He knows.

“But then Saren came, and I was… gone for two years, then the Collectors…”

“Hold on,” he says, “you were thinking about retiring? Before Saren?”

“Not retiring. But just, considering my options, right? I can’t do this forever. I always figured I wouldn’t — I always assumed I’d die like Samara, in combat, or without something… waiting back home. I assumed what was left of me wouldn’t be buriable. That’s what I agreed to when I swore the oath. Then — ” She swallows, closes her eyes. “Then it actually happened, and it’s not — meaningful. It’s not honorable. It’s just death.”

She’s never talked about her death before — either of them. “I think Mordin and Thane would disagree with you,” he says instead. And it’s true; Mordin and Thane had achieved good deaths, if such a thing were possible anymore. So had Legion, even.

“They chose it,” Shepard rebuffs. “Mordin was — he wanted to atone for his work on the genophage. Thane sacrificed himself to fight an assassin — I think he figured it was preferable to dragging the Kepral’s out. I’d — I accepted mine, but I didn’t want it. _Fuck_.” She leans forward and puts her head in her hands. “I can’t decide. It all happens so fast. I thought I wanted it, too. I thought I wanted it done.”

“Shepard…”

“But I didn’t, you know? I just took it, because it needed doing. I think I want to live for something more now. I’m not — ” 

Shepard suddenly releases her legs from the ground, and the twining chains above her head spin backwards, twirling her suddenly back into place. When the swing is rightfully sorted again, Shepard huffs out a frustrated sigh. She bites her lower lip. “I don’t think they’ll clear me for frontline duty anymore. Honorable discharge, or desk duty. Something _noble_ but out of the way. I’m gonna hate it. But I can’t serve traditionally anymore. I don’t have anything else.”

Garrus understands, or he thinks he does; surrounded by violence and war his entire adult life, it just gets easier to keep on. At a certain point during the war, though he’d be damned if he could pinpoint the exact moment, a corner of his mind began looking for an end, some form of escape. He let himself think of words like retirement and homemaking and — whatever humans call it. Marriage. Shit, he even let himself start thinking of children. But at the same time, he’s plagued with concerns that he might be — unsatisfied. That he might grow bored with a peaceful retirement when face-to-face with the reality, constantly looking over his shoulder for enemy squadrons and expecting a command in his ear. It’d never be the same.

Then again, what is?

“Shepard,” he tries again, because they don’t deal in platitudes like _you deserve to be happy_ , no matter how true they are. “What I said about — you know. Um. Retiring. Kids.” He knows he says the word like he’s scared of it. In a way, he is. He hadn’t expected her to play along with his interest, at the time. He still can’t quite remember what had spurred him to ask her what she thought about it in the first place. Where had he been going with this?

“No pressure,” he says finally, lamely. “We can — what’s the phrase?” She looks up at him, confused, and he tries: “Have it on an ear?”

Shepard stares blankly at him for a moment before snorting. “Play it by ear.”

“That’s it.” He swallows. “I mean to say, don’t take that as a… we didn’t sign a contract. If you want to say screw it and leave the Alliance and go pirating, I’m right for that too. Though I call dibs on the cannon.”

Shepard rolls her eyes. “Denied. Jack beat you to it two years ago.”

“Pity.”

She sighs and hooks all of her ten human fingers together, then stretches her arms upward. “You know they still haven’t given me an enddate for all this. _Indefinite_ leave. You might be in for a long haul if you’re really sticking arou — ”

“Stop asking me that,” Garrus says. He means it to come out jokingly, but by the way she turns to look at him, his tone was sharper than intended. “Shepard, if your abysmal driving didn’t put me off, a little med leave won’t.” In a spurt of tender bravery, he reaches out. Gently takes her hand. Drags her over to his side, her swing tilting with him, and she’s startled enough into a smile. “‘Fraid you’re stuck with me.”

“...And vice versa.” Shepard rocks the swing back and forth gently from the balls of her feet. He can see the gears in her brain, knows the questions that might be running in her head of logistics and homemaking and possibly _adopting_ , and but instead she says, surprising him, “Garrus. There's something I need to tell you.”

Surprised but attentive, he waits.

“Something to do with the — with activating the Catalyst.” She scrubs her face in her hand again, pinches the bridge of her nose. “But it’s coming back in bits and pieces. I can’t remember all of it. Some days I wake up, and I think I have it, but then — ”

“Hey, if it comes back, it comes back.”

“I feel like I’m missing something, though,” she says helplessly. “I think it’s something really important. Something that could help — ” She breaks off and blows a frustrated breath toward the sky. “Have they made any progress with EDI?”

Blinking, Garrus shakes his head. EDI has been a sore topic for the entire Normandy crew since the day her body collapsed in the cockpit and the ship had plummeted down into its crash landing in the Heptos system. But Shepard had never asked about her directly, only indirectly acknowledged her loss, along with the geth’s, with a numb sort of acceptance back in the hospital. “You think it has something to do with why she deactivated?” he asks her.

She looks up at the sky, which has long turned gray, and blows out a long, steady breath. “I don’t know.”

She doesn’t seem inclined to say more, and Garrus knows firsthand that pushing a witness struggling to make sense of a tragedy for more details never results in a helpful statement. If answers will come to her mind, they’ll come; he can’t find the energy for impatience, not now that they’ve long accepted that a universe without EDI, without the geth, without artificial intelligence at all, is simply one they’ll need to get used to.

“Come on,” he says finally, “let’s get back.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Reaper tech described here is almost certainly Wrong with a capital w but sadly I don’t know enough about hypothetical alien artificial intelligence to determine even that, but I invoke the right to creative scifi license and hope that will be enough.
> 
> This part has been edited with Garrus's dad's newly-released canon name from Andromeda.

Chakwas suffocates Shepard’s knee in a wrap and orders her iron supplements in the form of a new daily pill, which contains an additional fun bonus of making her nauseous throughout most of the mornings. Her strength, while tentative, is steadily increasing, and one evening when she’s on the rooftop doing more “pil-a-tees” to settle her stomach — something Chakwas had insisted upon continuing, assisted by Traynor’s eager emails of vids and tips — he feels he has a few free hours enough to spend trying to connect to his father’s personal line.

Strictly speaking, it’s restricted, or at least strongly frowned upon for civilians — a group he is unused to lumping himself with, though he isn’t sure if it’s fair to still call himself military while he refuses active duty — to hack themselves more bandwidth, especially since so many comm towers still need reestablishing. But there are perks to being friends with the Primarch: Victus had long ago set up private lines for the agents under his command to use on personal or colony-related business during assignments that would keep them from the local cluster for long periods of time. He hasn’t used his allotted share recently, restricting himself to text chats with his sister and audio on the rare occasion his father wanted to hear his voice.

Now, though, he finds himself wanting to see their faces, wanting — despite the tension within their history — the advice of someone who knows him, and where he comes from.

In his bedroom, he fiddles with his omni-tool to ensure the call can’t be traced or monitored — more out of habit than paranoia — and waits patiently for the connection. It should be morning there, though he’s not certain if his father will still be working with the operating base or focusing on relocating back to Palaven.

His father picks up on the third ring, and the feed flickers for a few seconds, static obscuring the image, before it snaps into focus and a familiar face is suddenly peering at him. Family friends and former coworkers, including late Primarch Fedorian himself, always loved to mention that Garrus and Castis Vakarian look alike — something that had followed him for years throughout C-Sec — though Garrus could never see it. He knows he has his mother’s coloring and texture, though as he’s grown older he thinks he can see a little of himself, if just barely, around his father’s eyes and the curve of his fringe.

“Garrus?”

“Hi, Dad.” Suddenly the real reason he’s called seems… juvenile. “Just checking in. You okay?”

“...Fine,” Castis replies, and Garrus can tell he doesn't believe him; there’s no reason to waste the data on a vidcall when audio or a ping would do just as well. “Better than last we spoke, actually. They’re putting the two of us on the first wave of shuttles back home.”

This is a bit surprising. “You sure Cipritine will be safe in time?”

“Not the greater area. We’ll be staying at your aunt’s old place, for a while.” To anyone else, the pause after this would seem just that, but Garrus knows hesitation in his family when he sees it. It’s a split-second enough to prepare himself for bad news before his father continues: “We heard from your uncle. I’m afraid she didn't make it.”

He had been ready to hear a laundry list of casualties; hell, for several weeks following the end he had prepared himself for the news of Solana perishing, hindered by her broken leg on the rush to evac. He wasn’t even close to his extended family, really, and Aunt Medea was never particularly kind to him, but… “I’m sorry, Dad.”

His father sighs. “Your cousins are there now. We finally have all of them accounted for. It was a close call with Riordus, for a while.” He scrubs a hand over the bottom of his right mandible; a sign of discontent that Garrus himself inherited when relaying bad news or disappointment to his team back in C-Sec. “Though I’m afraid Martina is missing.”

Garrus feels faintly stunned. Martina, Solana’s partner and an eezo engineer, had been working on stabilizing the relays after the end of the war. “Martina? There — I just heard from her a few months ago.”

“She went with a team of other engineers to work on the Iera Relay three weeks ago. There was apparently an ambush. Pirates seized the ship for parts and power. Most of the crew made it back, several confirmed dead, but several more unaccounted for.” Castis sighs heavily, looking equal parts mournful and resentful. “Solana… isn’t taking it well.”

He doesn’t blame her. He also doesn’t begrudge his father that determined, fiery look in his eyes, recognizing a similar helpless furiousness at an injustice he couldn’t prevent or rectify.

“She’s in the docking bay with the other pilots now, otherwise I’d call her up.”

“It’s fine,” Garrus says, “I did, er, want to talk to you, actually. Alone.”

Castis meets his eyes, focusing on him with a laser-like intensity — not unlike the look he’d given Garrus the day he had walked back into the Vakarian household after two years away and said, _Dad, I need you to listen to me_. It had been a much larger risk, then — an upcoming Reaper invasion, the destruction of all civilized life in the galaxy, a dying mother, Shepard in jail, and privately, an unshakable terror that he’d been all but disowned from the family in the time he’d been away — yet his heart is still pounding just as hard now, his tongue just as dry. 

“When you were — with mom, those last few months,” he begins, and his father stiffens. Garrus wills himself to remember the full weight of all the years he’d known her, to not let his memory be tainted by that damn dream. “How did you… deal?”

That could’ve been phrased better. This is untread ground between them, not helped by his admittedly childish wording; a year and a half ago, he wouldn’t have put it past his father to raise his voice in response. Hell, it would’ve been deserved, after he’d dropped out of contact. Now, with this tentative but undeniable newfound respect between them, he’s not entirely sure what’s common territory, or what might be pushing the bounds of tactlessness. He still hasn’t forgiven himself for not joining them by his mother’s bedside sooner.

“Your mother — ” Castis stops. “Garrus, why are you asking?”

For some reason, Garrus glances to the open doorway, as if he’s expecting to see Shepard watching him try to fumble through this, or offering a nod of support. She’s not, of course; she’s upstairs on the roof. She took her pills this morning. She hasn’t had a panic attack in weeks. She’s fine. But the gesture is apparently enough to give C-Sec’s most famed investigator the hint he needs.

“Aren’t you still with your commanding officer?” his father asks slowly. “The human Spectre.”

“Shepard, yeah. She’s — recovering.” 

“I heard she woke up from her coma.” His father’s tone gives away nothing, subvocals remaining frustratingly neutral.

The truth is, Garrus doesn’t know enough of his father to know how he would react to hearing about — the rest of it. He could talk war and combat and the most gruesome serial killer cases on the Citadel, mourn or rant about the horrors the Reapers had done to their species, yet a discussion with his remaining parent about his dead mother — hell, about his _girlfriend_ leaves him stumped. He’d thought, once, that he had known enough about his father to predict a reaction to every line his son might cross — he’d thought that he might be removed from wills for quitting his job to fight a rogue Spectre with another Spectre; he’d thought his father might demand his clan markings be stripped for signing onto a suicide mission with a human terrorist organization after spending two years playing vigilante in the worst cesspool in the galaxy. Now, he knows a little better. But some part of him doesn’t want to test the bet that Castis Vakarian wouldn’t be pleased to find his son is sharing a bed — living his _life_ — with a human.

Garrus wants his father to take this seriously. This is the oddest feeling of all of it, and it reminds him bizarrely of his younger self, driven to C-Sec out of a childish desire for his father’s approval. He wants him to know that Shepard is — _real_ , that she’s it for him. But unloading this upon a veteran of the Relay 316 Incident, particularly after he had just escaped the Collectors and his standing in the Hierarchy had been on shakeable ground for years — there had just never been the right opportunity. Maybe there won’t be for some time. Which means… He knows what this means. He will need to make one. And despite his impatience to see acceptance on both ends, to do them both right, he knows he will need to introduce the idea slowly.

“Yeah,” he says now, and decides to lean toward caution for now. Solana has her theories about his love life, but there’s no reason to assume she’s told their father. There’s a line, even as siblings that make a sport out of teasing, he trusts her not to cross. “I’m staying with her. Till she gets back on her feet.”

“You’re not assigned to the Normandy any longer. Will you be returning to Palaven, or the Citadel? Victus was called there last week.”

“Probably not home,” Garrus says, relieved that his father brought up the option. “The Citadel is more likely, once she’s good to travel. If you both want to come, I’m sure — ”

“We’ll manage for the moment. Your cousins need some company, I think.”

“Right.” He lets out a breath. “Course.”

There’s a bit of a pause that’s neither awkward nor entirely comfortable. Garrus can’t find it in him to apologize, for — for something he’s not even sure he can define. Not being a proper son? Not hopping the first shuttle back to Palaven?

“About your mother,” Castis begins —

“No, I shouldn’t have asked you that.” Garrus swallows. “Sorry. I just.”

Castis eyes him quietly, then he hears his father voice words he never in his strangest daydreams thought he’d hear: “You’re loyal to Shepard, Garrus. I understand.”

“I — ” He had been about to say, _we’re a little closer than loyalty,_ but somehow that seems inappropriate after asking about his mother. “Yeah.” Then he adds, a bit lamely, “She’s just been through a lot.”

“Naturally. Though the Hierarchy or Council will always have a use for you when you’re ready to return to work.”

“Victus has made that pretty clear, yeah. Wait — Council?”

His father flares his mandibles in a one-sided sort of smile. It feels weird, coming from his father; it reminds him of Solana’s teasing. “I’ve heard rumors about Quentius considering you for their cabinet. Which seems far more likely than the rumor that you’ve agreed to become a Spectre.”

Garrus doesn’t prevent the groan that escapes him. He’d heard the news from Victus, of course, but the thought of his father grinding his teeth over rumors of him joining Special Tactics and Reconnaissance for months isn’t pleasant.

“That answers that question,” his father says. “I admit I’m relieved. I did also hear that you were on that excursion to — where was it? Germany? Can you tell me what’s going on there?”

Garrus blinks. “That was months ago.”

“...Yes,” Castis says, but there’s a meaningful stress on the word. His father looks closely at him — unfortunate, that he can still make him feel like a naive kid again dozens of solar systems away. Not for the first time, he wonders if it’s a Castis Vakarian thing, or a universal parental trait. Looking curious, he asks, “You hadn’t heard?”

“An update about Germany? I suppose I haven’t,” Garrus says slowly. “Care to fill me in?”

Castis shakes his head. “We’re just hearing rumors, nothing concrete. I recommend talking to — who’s the acting head of the Alliance at the moment?”

“They have a new Council, but the commanding Admiral is Steven Hackett. What’s this about? Was there something in that data we delivered?”

His father only shakes his head. “Consult with Hackett, then. I’m afraid I only have hearsay. They should’ve provide you with details directly. I heard you led the mission.”

Which is great in theory, or would be, if Garrus hadn’t been ignoring Hackett’s messages ever since he’d asked him to provide the Alliance brass with weekly updates on Shepard’s recovery. Garrus had hacked and erased all history of his read receipts and pretended he’d never seen _that_ particular email, or any since.

“I just led a team into the bunker,” Garrus says, more than a little confused. “And I didn’t get to fire a bullet into anything, so I’m not sure if he’ll consider my contribution a great sacrifice.” Before his dad can chide him, he adds, “But all right, I will, thanks. Are you — ?”

His father turns his head sharply, looking at something offscreen, and Garrus waits.

“Yes,” Castis says, “We’re on the first wave out. Dock B-84.”

After another few moments, he thanks the stranger on the other side of the screen, then turns back to Garrus.

“We’re leaving soon,” he says, “Two days from now. We might be out of contact for a while until we get situated on the ground, but I’ll send you an update as soon as I can.”

“All right,” Garrus says, and even though he didn’t quite manage to get an answer to his question he feels calmer, more comfortable in a way that he hadn’t before speaking to his father. “I’ll keep my line open. Say hi to Sol for me.”

“One more thing,” Castis says, and the tone in his subvocals is tense and sensitive at the same time. “We’re… planning on a memorial for your mother, as soon as we’re all together. Nothing has been set yet. But if you’d like to prepare something.”

“…Right.” Somehow his voice is still working through the cold, empty feeling in his lungs. “I will.” A sudden burst of courage prompts him to add, “And — Dad. When we see each other in person, I have something to tell you. Show you, hopefully.”

Castis blinks. “Should I be concerned?”

“Ah — no. No.” A joke. Spirits, he needs a joke so his father doesn’t think he’s gone off and eloped with a korgan shaman or something. “Unless you’re still allergic to varren fur.”

A slightly awkward pause follows, during which Garrus starts to regret ever opening his mouth; and then his dad closes his eyes and huffs out a familiar sound from his childhood, the tired sigh of a long-suffering parent with a wiseass child. “Spirit of Cipritine save me from your humor, Garrus, but it’s damn good to hear it again. I’ll talk to you soon, son.”

Something clenches in him. “…Bye, Dad.”

Garrus disconnects the line, heaves out a sigh that makes him feel a century old, and turns —

Shepard is standing in the doorway.

“Sorry,” she says quickly. Garrus has frozen in place. “I came into get — ” She swallows, glancing to the forgotten cane lying next to the bed. “I didn’t know you lost your mother.”

…No, she hadn’t known, had she. One of those things he’d always meant to getting around to saying — _hey, in the midst of the galaxy exploding like a supernova, my mother is dying of Corpalis_ — before reasoning that the former crisis outweighed the latter. Nobody on the Normandy save Victus even knew she’d been sick — Shepard, who has heard enough sob stories, would’ve insisted on _doing_ something, and the outpouring of sympathy when word inevitably got to the crew would’ve put him in a foul mood, anyway. The Vakarians are practical, honorable, and they don’t look back. Keeping busy defeating the Reapers was something his mother would’ve understood — would’ve wanted, in fact.

That doesn’t make this any less difficult.

“Yeah,” he says roughly, suddenly unsure of where to put his hands. He settles with powering down his omnitool. “It, uh, started when you — after Sovereign. Nothing we could do.” And then, because she looks like she’s going to start saying things like _I’m sorry_ , he says: “It is what it is.”

Shepard nods, then hesitantly sits on the bed next to him. He makes room for her to ease her leg down, then reaches a hand out to massage the area gently. “I should’ve asked about your family before now.” She suddenly looks furious with herself. “But — I have wondered. Are your father and sister all right?”

“They’re fine,” he says truthfully. Answering questions about anything but his mother, about her pain and confusion in those last few months, is a relief he will take. He concentrates on her knee; the muscles below it are tight.  “They made it to Tenipus, one of our strongest emergency evac bases. Sol helped run flight sims — she’s a pilot — and Dad had the time of his life helping out with paperwork.”

She tugs jokingly on his mandible and he forces a grin. “They’re good. A little stranded and wondering what the hell we’ll do with the house, but good.”

“You said Cipritine was hit hard. Was everything…?”

“Ah — most of the infrastructure is destroyed, but a lot of private homes survived. It’s not unlike here. They’re rebuilding too, but more slowly. You heard about our new toxicity problem?” At her nod, he continues, “They’re still getting those pollution management centers operational again. Until they do, it doesn’t really matter how much gets rebuilt.”

“All of Palaven?”

“Some of the major world centers. A few million people have resettled back into their old homes, actually. Most districts are still on rations, but it’s sustainable.” He flares his mandibles in what he hopes looks encouraging and he removes his hand from her leg. “The turian race doesn’t need saving, Battlemaster. You can take a nap.”

“Ha, ha.” She places her arms back onto the bed behind her and leans back on them, stretching her leg out. The prosthetic foot rests against the floor at a diagonal angle; Shepard rolls her thigh in and out slowly, testing the movement with her knee wrapped in the bandage. He counts it a good sign that she doesn’t wince.

…If she’d heard the part about his mom, he suddenly realizes, then she must have heard the bit at the end, about introducing her to his dad. Spirits alive, why hadn’t he asked her first? He hadn’t ever seriously raised the topic of meeting the family. Was this too fast?

“I’m sorry.” Her voice startles him from his thoughts, and he registers that she’s dropped into a more solemn tone. “That the treatments didn’t work.”

Garrus nods, and then suddenly, his focus hones in on one thing. “What?”

“What?”

Had he mentioned something himself? Had his dad, over the line? No, he’s pretty sure — “I never mentioned her treatment plan.”

Garrus never would’ve thought he might one day look at his commanding officer and compare her to the guilt-ridden face of a criminal suspect, but Shepard freezes like a teenager caught in the middle of a lie in an interrogation room. She stares at him for a long moment, then begins to sit up straighter, pushing off her hands. 

“About a year ago,” she begins slowly, voice hoarse, “when we took down the old Shadow Broker.” She stops.

Confused, he says, “Go on.” He means it to be encouraging, but she flinches.

“I shouldn’t have snooped.” It’s like she’s talking to herself. “But I did. I thought it would help, would be — something to do with Omega, or your squad. I thought…”

Garrus is completely lost. “What are you talking about?”

“The old Shadow Broker kept records on you.” She’s looking straight at him, but Garrus isn’t entirely sure he is seeing where she is in return. “Well — he had the whole team. Liara forwarded them to me. She thought knowing might help, ah, as your… commander. I thought it would be stuff like academy records. I didn’t know she’d send me — what she did.”

Garrus stares at her. “The Broker knew about my mother.”

She sighs. “Some of it didn’t matter. There were some chat transcripts. One was — one was from your sister, about your mom.”

Garrus’s immediate reaction, oddly, is that his family will be furious upon discovery that the hero of the galaxy knows more about them than they do about her. He should be the same. He should be — angry. Somewhere deep down, he is, a little; Shepard invaded his privacy. Two generations of Shadow Brokers and however many agents knew about his mother. Shepard knows — _has_ known a part of him than he would have preferred to keep from her until he feels he can talk about his mother without feeling every part of him clench in grief. Yet he also registers a uncomforting sort of relief that he has managed to avoid _the conversation_ : the one in which he must tell his girlfriend, who already carries too much, that a close member of his family has passed of an incurable disease, and the rest of his family might begrudge him for the rest of his life for not being there soon enough.

Perhaps that last bit isn’t true. Still.

“I want to see it,” he says finally, “the records.”

Shepard nods slowly. “I don’t have them anymore. Liara probably does. Or Glyph can probably recite it. I think she uses him for replaying records that were lost when the base crashed over Hagalaz.”

“Right,” he says, and suddenly he needs to leave. “Excuse me.”

“Garrus — ”

“I can’t talk about this,” he interrupts, and any turian within ten kilometers would be able to read the tone of his subvocals as an underlying message to _leave it alone_ , but Shepard is human and she needs things explained in _more words_. “Later.”

“Okay,” she tries, and then because she is Shepard, she adds, “I’m here if you — ”

“Thanks, Shepard,” he grunts, but he’s already out the door.

* * *

Garrus watches the sunset on the roof alone. Five minutes ago, he had received a ping from Liara, attached with several files, the latest of which was dated some two years ago, before they took on the base at Hagalaz together.

 _Shepard told me you wanted to see these,_ it reads. _I’m sorry, Garrus. I should’ve offered sooner. I gave them to Shepard because I thought they would help her. But you deserved better._

He had made it through the profile description — _leadership potential overshadowed, unlikely to further develop_ — and even somehow managed to make it two lines into the first log — the fucking chat transcript of his last conversation with Sol before the relay, was _nothing_ private? — before he closed out of the file.

He pauses, however, before exiting out of his inbox. Victus has sent him a single email within the last week; a sharp decrease in volume from the months previous. It remains the only mail in his inbox still unread.

Garrus taps it open.

_FROM: THE OFFICE OF THE PRIMARCH_  
_TO: G. Vakarian_  
_TIMESTAMP: 8-29-87 17:16PM_  
_RE: Your service_

_Garrus,_

_I understand your lack of response is likely due to Captain Shepard’s health. I apologize for not asking after her condition sooner. I hear from Adm. Hackett that she has been released from the hospital recently. I hope she’ll find her strength returning quicker than expected._

_I received your latest update (7-24-87) regarding the lost turian patrol. Thank you. Please deliver the nametags you managed to recover to Lieutenant Imiria, stationed in your area at the Central UK HQ, or if you plan on visiting the Citadel within the upcoming months, I would receive them directly at my new office: New Presidium, Suite 359, Larissa Ward. For obvious reasons, I would prefer they be delivered by hand, not through the mail. Let me know whichever you choose so I and our resident historian can expect them._

_Your yearlong contract, dated 6-10-86 with Palaven Command under Late Primarch Fedorian, expired last month. Per your silence in response to the office’s inquiries if you would like to extend it annually as necessary to participate in Reaper cleanup, I am also writing to confirm that your agreement will not be renewed. I suspect you will take this news with no small relief. However, I would consider myself a poor superior if I didn’t make it clear that those of us in the Hierarchy who had the honor of serving with you will remember the service you gave in warning our government before the enemy struck, the tireless efforts you made to preserve our race and community, and the honor with which you served during the war and after. I am certain your name will keep the historians busy for some time, which hopefully fills you with less dread than the same thought does for me. (When asked, I saw no reason to mention to our archivists that you have been under independent contract, unless you would prefer otherwise.)_

_Last but certainly not least, I am writing to let you know that as my position as Palaven’s Primarch begins to look more permanent, I have been in consistent communication with Councilor Quentius, who last told me he has made his decisions on the Council’s future cabinet, with you — ideally — heading the counterterrorism branch. Should you accept, your full title would be Executive Commander of Council Space, operating from the Citadel. You would also perform work for the Bureau within the Hierarchy — and by extension, me once more — but in practice, you would coordinate closely with and report directly to Quentius and his peers in your day-to-day. I understand your disinclination for anything resembling a political office; as such, Quentius is amenable to tailoring the position to your strengths. This offer would involve you directing and leading higher-risk missions, particularly those addressing the escalating pirate situation within the Iera System, as circumstances require. I am sure he will be able to offer you more specifics when he extends the formal letter._

_I recall you once mentioning a strong interest of yours was Spectrehood. I don’t know if your ambitions have changed, but with your current tier and status within the Hierarchy, I believe this is not an impossible goal for you, and I would be glad to push your name to the proper channels should you decide to pursue it. If you are concerned for your father’s approval, rest assured I would, if you like, defend your aptitude for the position and cite your regard for the responsibilities; I consider you well suited for either this or the bureau position. As a general and fellow soldier, I can truthfully say I have seen enough evidence of your valor to justify a reapplication to Spectre candidacy, and if Vakarian Sr. had seen the same, I have no doubt he would feel as strongly as I that you should be considered eligible for a higher tier._

_Regardless of your decision, I count you as an honorable friend, as I hope I have been for you during our time on Menae and aboard the SR-2. Your service aboard the Normandy with Gen. Shepard has undoubtedly helped to mend many lingering wounds from the Relay 314 Incident and contributed to our unexpected but welcome new camaraderie with humanity. Whether or not you accept the bureau position, you are welcome to call on me directly should you ever have need of the Primarch’s office._

_Please give my very best to Gen. Shepard, and my wishes to her on a speedy recovery. The galaxy, and the Hierarchy, remains immeasurably grateful._

_Sincerest regards,_

_A. Victus_

_PS: Forgive me for not acknowledging your role in Tarquin’s rescue sooner. My son is, as I’m sure you can imagine, still difficult to discuss. But I have been comforted these past few months by the knowledge that in his last moments he was among my companions, if he could not be with his own. I believe that your presence might have given him a comfort in his final mission that only a fellow Hierarchy soldier could offer. I am, as always, thankful to you for acting as a cultural interpreter for our military to the Alliance during our cooperation, and proud of my son beyond the meaning any words could convey._

Garrus reads it twice, something in his chest clenching tight. Before he can let himself consider reading it once more, he closes his inbox, and for good measure, powers down his tool. 

He leans against the railing and thinks.

For the first time in the four years he’s known her, he’s considering —

It’s entirely hypothetical. Yet — talks of home, and duty, and missing family, all bouncing off of the bubble of this peaceful but bizarre state of liminality they are living in now, have led him to consider… 

Maybe she needs to spend time with other humans, other military. Alliance Council placed her on medical leave to save what remains of her health, an order which no one seems ready to rescind, but seeing her in this city, Garrus isn’t entirely convinced staying here doing more good than harm.

Maybe she needs to leave. Maybe they both do.

Across the street and one rooftop over, Garrus sees a human climb up onto his own roof and pull something out from the shed. Automatically, his visor zooms in, the crack in the metal above his eye distorting part of the lens — he really should get that fixed — and he thinks the man’s face looks vaguely familiar. An old commander he’d once passed by on the Citadel, perhaps? When the stranger turns to notice him across the way, Garrus sees he’s missing an eye, and he dismisses the thought. That could be anyone.

The man calls out, something that sounds cordial and might be a greeting, but the distance is too far for him to make it out. Garrus politely raises a hand in response, and soon enough, the man leaves the way he came.

Garrus sighs. He turns back to the sun and something catches his eye a few feet to his left on the edge of the rooftop, the side looking west. He peers to examine it: the stubs of human cigarettes, extinguished, resting on a small bed of ash. Cigarettes he’s sure hadn’t been here when he’d last been up here.

He scrubs a hand over his face and leans against the edge, looking out. This time of night, a neighborhood should see families on the sidewalks below; should hear people talking, laughing, moving on with their lives. Instead there’s just the occasional chip of Earth’s birds, and the silence of military generals, war heros of all races, slowly healing inside.

Shepard… Shepard had saved him from the ruins of his own mistakes when he’d had nothing to his name except the busted armor off his back and half of his face hanging on. Exploring the city as they had — would he have acted any differently if they had been stuck in Cipritine? Would he have enjoyed sharing his ruined hometown with her, or simply tolerated it to entertain her curiosity?

Shit, his apartment on the Citadel — at times, even his hideout on Omega — had felt more like home than his parents’ place. Crawling back after the Collectors to beg for support from someone, anyone, amidst the looming terror of the Reapers and the heartache he was ignoring with his mother two systems away hooked up to a hospital bed and incomprehensible salarian tech — Palaven hadn’t felt like home then, too.

Shepard doesn’t get to go home either. The Normandy is home; the crew is home; this is forced leave in a city she once knew. Temporary for the both of them.

Victus’s email. _Politics._ And yet — more than he’d expected for a so-called worthless upstart, considering the social hole he had dug himself into less than two years ago. Vigilante, contractor, advisor. Executive. _Commander._

Or possible Spectre, if he played his cards right. The thought no longer excites him — he hasn’t been enthralled with the “agent-outside-the-law” nonsense in a long time — and there were, as always, times it was necessary, but double the amount of times that it wasn’t. But Spectrehood — he believed it could still work for him and his lifestyle, in theory. In theory.

In practice, he wasn’t entirely sure if a lifetime of combat was attractive anymore. There is a reason for the old saying, _they died younger than the oldest Spectre_ — a favorite of his father’s. The Council’s list of agents that lived to see fifty was depressingly short.

And Quentius… It was fairly clear this would be the final warning before he had to make a decision.

“Garrus.”

He turns. Shepard is standing at the entrance to the stairs, looking — better. Almost like she’d looked before the end.

He blinks. Her hair is wet — shower — and she has the look of a woman who’s made up her mind about something, the classic Commander Shepard look of a friendly gun who’s here to help, who’s going to fix the problem. He hasn’t seen that look in so long, he’d nearly forgotten how calming it can feel, to be on the receiving end.

“I brought dinner.” She holds up a small take-out bag tentatively, a peace offering, and leans on the cane as she heads over. “I tried to make — _passami? —_ how you said, but I got the spices confused again. But you said the quarian down the street makes decent dextro.”

He finds that the issues that had incensed him enough to escape to the roof have faded. Garrus holds out a hand, accepting the peace offering. “I might’ve exaggerated to make him feel better,” he says as she moves to join him at the railing. “If this was real passami, your soft human fingers wouldn’t be able to hold that bag from all the grease.”

She shoves it at him. “Remind me never to pick off your plate if I ever start feeling adventurous.”

“Hasn’t stopped you before.”

“What’s in this, anyway?” She peers as he unwraps it slowly, from the top. “Looks like a burrito.”

What the hell is a burrito? “It’s not a — whatever that is. It’s passami. Raw rogani, spices — this looks like halithrax, and morentus sauce. Sometimes they add pyjak liver — ”

“Sounds great,” Shepard says quickly.

Garrus chuckles and starts eating, taking care to catch the juice. He’s not particularly hungry, but he had learned quickly over the past month that if he doesn’t manage food down himself, Shepard is quick to call him a hypocrite for pushing her to eat too.

After he’s licked a few fingers, she starts tentatively: “I’m sorry about… the — you know.”

“...It’s fine, Shepard.”

She looks at him. The edge of her new eye glints against the orange streetlight down below.  “Is it?”

“You already know everything that matters. You’d’ve found out eventually.”

Shepard doesn’t reply; she waits until he’s halfway through his meal before saying, “I had another one.”

Garrus looks at her sharply. “You should’ve called.”

“No, I shouldn’t,” she replies. “It was quick. Then I went out and got food and ate my share.” She pauses. “That’s how it should be.”

…How it should be. No, he almost says, that’s not how it “should be” — she shouldn’t be having panic attacks and night terrors that keep her from daily functions, shouldn’t —

And yet.

“You sure you’re good?” He asks warily.

“It was over so fast,” Shepard says, frowning. Her hands are folding and re-folding the receipt that had come within the bag, twisting it into impossibly small shapes. “And then I finished in the bath and I was fine. It was over in a minute.”

Well that’s — something. It had taken half an hour to calm her heart to a normal rate the last time. “Good,” he says, then pauses. “You know, I was thinking — “

“Why don’t we get out of here?” she says at the same time as he says, “They could use us somewhere.”

Shepard looks at him. Garrus looks back. “Where were you thinking?”

“I heard the Council is going to have its second meeting next week,” she says slowly. “They still haven’t elected a human councilor to replace Udina. Osoba doesn’t want it.”

“Do not,” he jokes, “tell me you’re thinking of running for office.”

To his surprise, instead of laughing, Shepard twists her mouth. “Not exactly. Sadly — well, most of the people who would be viable for the position…” She waves a hand to encompass the sentiment that doesn’t need elaborating. “We’ll probably have to start from scratch. Until someone’s elected, though, I wouldn’t mind — you know, filling in temporarily.” She scrunches her face up in discomfort. “I’m concerned if the next person isn’t — enough, they might go back on their decision to let us have the seat. We don’t have a great track record. The only other names they’d consider working with are Hackett, or maybe Admiral Boncelet, but neither would leave the Alliance for a political desk job if they paid in gold. Might as well be useful while I’m prevented from active duty.” She turns to look at him now, eye to eye. “You ever think if only they knew what it was really like, to see war up-close? If only they knew what it’s like to be in the middle of it, see what’s reality for the rest of us, maybe they could actually do some fucking good?”

Garrus realizes that his passami is hanging over the edge of the roof, no doubt cool. A drip of sauce has already fallen off the side onto the sidewalk below. His mind is preoccupied with logistics: Shepard knows as much as he does about politics and policies, and her idea of _compromise_ is yelling at a salarian dalatrass and curing the genophage anyway.

— But. She’s seen the war and its aftermath up close. She knows what’s practical, what needs doing. She knows interspecies relations better than most politicians. It’s not the worst idea he’s heard.

He says evenly, “I suppose if Victus can be Primarch, you can be Councilor.”

“Don’t say it like that.” The look on her face makes him laugh. “I was thinking an advisor role, until I’m fit for duty somewhere else again. It’s not even a political position anymore, is it? We’re all in public service now. I just want humanity to feel — stable, right? Like someone’s looking out for them on the galactic scale again. Anderson didn’t think he’d go into politics at the end of his career either, but… necessary evils, I suppose.”

“Hold up,” Garrus interjects, “you’re leaving the Alliance for this?”

Shepard hesitates. “Technically joining the military restricts me from holding office. They make exceptions for cases like Anderson, because Sovereign left every political structure a mess, and Udina — ” She rolls her eyes again, and he grins at that. “The Alliance only let the Admiral go until our embassy was sorted, then he came back to our space. I think — ” She abandons the old paper receipt and twists her fingers together, cracking her knuckles (he prevents his own hands from reaching over to make her _stop it_ ). “Maybe I could do something similar to Anderson. Because I heard we lost Jondum Bau.”

It takes a minute for Garrus to recognize the name.

“The head of Special Tactics?” he says slowly.

“There’s no leader, really,” she says. “But he was our unofficial spokesperson. If we had problems or our work overlapped, we usually coordinated through him. I met him briefly when I was sworn in, and again last year on the Citadel, but I’m not sure if they have a replacement. I’m not even sure what role Spectres are going to play for the Council now. I’m thinking — ”

She snorts but scrubs the back of her head; a nervous tick. “Your father might like this. Ash and I have been emailing. She met with some other Spectres when she was guarding the Councilors. We were thinking — just vaguely — that Special Tactics need more structure. This wild-west thing only works for so long. Including maybe some form of ethics reform ordinance. Even if we need to break it occasionally to get the job done, we should be held accountable. Maybe — tiers of severity for collateral damage, instead of this ‘anything goes’ policy. Appropriate details with the records of mission logs. There should be steps to stop Saren from happening again. And the Council needs to get on it before people start taking advantage of the post-war confusion.”

Garrus nods, as though he is used to his girlfriend announcing an entrance into politics and restructuring the entire Spectrehood system for future generations in the same breath. Yet with Shepard, the impossible always seems bizarrely possible, in its own way. Some part of him isn’t surprised she’s been thinking on ways to move forward, parallel to his own.

“So,” Garrus says, “now would be a good time to tell you my news.”

She turns immediately to look at him, surprised and wary.

“Ah. Um, Victus says — ” He coughs. “Quentius wants me on his team. Counterterrorism advisor. In the immediate future, though, it’ll be about recovering nuclear weapons so they don’t fall into stray merc hands.” A bit rushed: “I don’t know when he’s going to extend the formal offer. But if that’s the case — ”

“You gonna do it?”

“I wasn’t,” he says honestly, “until you came up here. Now I’m warming up to the idea of living in a climate that doesn’t fill my carapace with water whenever I step out for groceries.”

“Then I guess the next question is, how soon do you think we can convince Cortez to fly us to Geneva to hijack the Normandy?”

Garrus laughs. “Probably five minutes ago.”

“Yeah…”

Shepard finds the long-abandoned cigarette and fiddles with it, seeming to consider it. After a moment, she flicks it over the railing and watches the sun disappear just past the trees. The sky on the horizon has turned a remarkable purple-pink, tufts of clouds floating over the rows of houses and black trees. It’s the kind of view one wouldn’t see on Palaven — the sunsets Garrus had grown up with had been soft greens, or bright gold — so he watches quietly, partner by his side, and tries to imagine the future. 

“So what do you think?”

He scratches his fringe. “Of?”

“Earth.” She shrugs with one shoulder, but he can tell she’s been wanting to ask this question for a while.

It’s a fair question. He certainly hasn’t seen it at its best. But he understands why someone would want to come back.

Their place, though, is somewhere else.

“I can see why you fought so hard for it,” he says honestly.

“Really.” She snorts. “You didn’t exactly have the best welcome.”

“Really,” he agrees. “Why?”

“Next time we’re on Earth,” she says, and he smiles at the word _we_ , “you need to see the good stuff. None of this old-world European crap. Let’s go to California.”

“Cal-ih…?”

“It’s where James is from. I’ve always wanted to go. Beaches. Hot weather. No snow.”

“Ohh, Shepard, keep talking.”

She laughs, and he sobers a little. “You sure about this? Moving to the Citadel permanently?”

“Mm.” Shepard turns around, her back against the stone rail, and puts her elbows against it, leaning back and closing her eyes. Her face to the stars, neck a curved outline against the blackening sky. It’s gotten dark fast.

“Yeah,” she breathes out, “I am.” Her left eye — the synthetic one — cracks open to look at him. “I was wondering, if you’re not opposed… one day I’d like to see your home turf too.”

“...You’ve seen the Zakera Ward, Shepard, it’s nothing special.”

“Not — there.” She looks away.

His heart stutters. “Cipritine?”

“Yeah. Show me around, next time?”

He flicks her hair. “Sure, sweetheart.”

Shepard grins. “That’s my choice, then.”

“What?”

“For our third date.”

Against the shadows of the darkened street below, the ancient lamplights buzz and flicker, and then finally come to life.

* * *

“Captain,” Hackett greets them over the line. It’s just after breakfast the next morning, and outside, England is foggy, with only a few warm streaks of sunlight trickling through the balcony window. The picture on the comm is steady — better than most video chatter has been the past few months — but still not detailed enough to determine his reaction when Shepard makes a face at his greeting. Garrus’s mandibles twitch in amusement.

“Admiral,” she says in response, apparently choosing to leave the fight against her promotion for another day. “Thanks for taking the call. I’ll get right to it.”

“Any questions I had about your health just went up in smoke,” Hackett huffs a laugh. “As a matter of fact, I’m glad you called. I have some news to share with you. But I imagine you’re wondering when I can put you back on duty?”

“I’m afraid it’s the opposite, sir,” Shepard says quickly. “I was wondering if you’d accept my request for leave, concurrent with my recovery. With active duty out of the question, I’d be of better use on the Citadel.”

“How long are you requesting?”

“Indefinitely, sir.”

Garrus doesn’t think he’s ever seen the admiral unnerved before, but he’s not sure what else to call the slightly shocked look in his eyes, the tension in his brows. “Be frank with me, Captain. Should I be expecting an announcement of your retirement soon?”

There’s a bit of a pause. “…It’s on the table, sir. I’d like to get my affairs in order before deciding.”

Garrus winces.

After a long silence, Hackett speaks. “I can’t say I’m surprised,” he says. “Approved, soldier. Send it to me in writing and I’ll sign off. Though I’d like to keep in regular contact.”

“Yes, Admiral. I’d prefer to remain supervised by Karin Chakwas, if she’s available to travel. I hear they’re still understaffed at Huerta with active soldiers and recovering victims, and St. Bart’s isn’t seeing the types of patients she specializes in.”

“Chakwas will likely prefer that, I agree. Granted, Captain. Get her approval and let me know, otherwise I can have your other surgeon accompany you.”

Garrus is pretty sure he’s the only one who catches the tight look Shepard adopts; it’s practically an outright grimace to him. She’d hated her second surgeon. “Effective immediately, sir?”

“If you wouldn’t mind waiting, the Queen will be returning to Britain next week,” Hackett says. “As will I. On the following weekend she’ll be knighting most of our surviving top officials, the two of us included. You might want to keep your leave a secret until then.”

Shepard stares at him. “Why is this the first time I’m hearing about this?” she asks, not rudely.

“They kept it strictly on a need-to-know basis, as you can imagine,” he says mildly. “It’ll be recorded, but not broadcast live. They’re very strict about the ‘no media’ element nowadays. If I didn’t know better I might be under the impression this is more out of genuine gratitude.”

Garrus is vaguely lost as they discuss ceremony and politics (“I’m not even an British citizen anymore.” “Neither am I — we just wouldn’t hold the titles. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if they offered you citizenship again.”) but he picks up the conversation again when Shepard huffs, “I’ll think about it.”

“Please do,” Hackett replies. Garrus has the faint impression he’s amused with her disinclination to be formally honored. “Was there something else you wanted to talk about?”

“Yes,” Garrus speaks up for the first time. “Admiral, about the mission to Germany a few months ago. There are rumors going around about that data.”

“Brüggen,” Hackett says, and Garrus is surprised to pick up the hint of guilt in his tone. “Yes, I owe the both of you an update there. I actually just off the phone from the woman in charge of that one, Director Machado. Her direct superior ordered those bunker teams. Only he knew all of the specifics, and they passed onto her upon his death in the final push toward Earth. Soon after that, though, the clearance was transferred to her account once we were sure indoctrination was no longer an issue, and in light of the war’s aftermath, we haven’t had time to engage in it since.”

“My father said it had something to do with the geth, sir?”

“Not exactly. That’s a recent development.” Hackett says, suddenly serious. “Let me start from the beginning. The data you recovered was from a team put in one of seven bunkers hidden in Alliance space. The goal of this project was to find a weakness in Reaper technology. A virus, an electronic wave, an Achilles’ heel. No success came in from the other teams — but apparently this one made a breakthrough before the Reapers blocked their signal.”

“Why weren’t they rescued after the war ended?” Shepard asks. From what Garrus had given her, Shepard has an understanding of the basics of that mission — a dead Reaper, a bunker of bodies, one last functional VI —  but she knows little else.

“Four of the teams were recovered. They reestablished contact within a week after the Crucible fired. The Reaper tech they were working on suddenly shut down; we timed these deactivations to right about the time when you activated the Catalyst. So their mission was rendered obsolete; and the other three never replied to emergency calls.”

“Weren’t their locations recorded?” Shepard’s voice is surprisingly cold.

“Communications were scrambled for months after the Crucible, Captain,” Hackett says heavily. “And their coordinates, along with the details of the missions, were heavily encrypted in the only database they were stored. Machado herself has been in Huerta for most of the past year; she’s just recently became capable of holding a conversation for longer than ten minutes. I’m afraid this one is new to me, too.”

“What’s this to do with the geth, sir?” Garrus asks.

“That’s the news,” he sighs; the sound gives the frequency a bit of static. “And I don’t want this rumor to gain too much traction before our engineers can even confirm it’s a likely possibility. But there are discussions…” He clears his throat. “Our researchers on the Citadel have the data now, and they believe we might use it to reverse-engineer a solution for the AI problem.”

There’s a small pause.

“How is that, exactly?” Shepard asks.

“The Crucible fired an immense amount of energy the day you set it off, Shepard,” Hackett explains, “but nobody still knows precisely what it did. All we know is that every Reaper in the galaxy collapsed, and the relays and all known AI went down with them.”

Shepard furrows her brow, as though she wants to say something. Garrus glances at her, but she doesn’t interrupt.

“As you know, we’ve been concerning ourselves with reestablishing communications, maintaining our hospitals and field medics, and distributing rations, too much to reexamine non-essential or obsolete projects. But some of our top engineers that worked on the Crucible have a working theory that the Catalyst was — ” There’s a moment of silence. “Well, the Catalyst is what allowed them to target and neutralize the specific programming that allowed them to function.”

“You’re saying the geth,” Shepard says slowly, “went offline… because their programming included Reaper code? They downloaded coding that allowed them to self-modify, that day on Rannoch.”

“The hypothesis is that any isolated system containing any form or derivant of Reaper technology was shut down,” Hackett replies, “but yes, that’s the current understanding. The Protheans realized the Crucible was a fail-safe, a relay, _and_ a possible weapon. It used the Citadel — the Reaper’s own technology — against them. But only the Catalyst was destroyed in the explosion, not the entire Citadel, since it seems the Catalyst held an aware intelligence to target. Only Reaper AI programs were affected, and the only Reaper-related active programs that we knew of were the geth.”

Garrus looks over at her meaningfully. She meets his eyes; they’re on the same page. They’re both thinking of EDI.

“So those teams researched a series of counter-programs to destroy or hinder Reaper code — which our engineers had already succeeded in with the Crucible, though we didn’t know it at the time. Of course, we’ve lost the Catalyst now, but we have much better understanding of their programming thanks to this team. We took that project on faith using technology we didn’t quite understand ourselves, but now that we understand what it did, some of those same engineers are hypothesizing about working backwards. A bit like finding the lock after you realized you’ve lost the key, but we have the keysmith who designed the lock on hand. With secure measures, certain parts of Reaper code might be safely reactivated within isolated systems. The geth’s reactivation is a… complicated, but altogether feasible possibility.”

“I imagine it’d be more encouraging if we had access to the location the Crucible docked.” But that had been destroyed in the explosion. Shepard scrubs a face over her hand. “Yeah. So what’s the status?”

“The tentative title for the assignment is Project Legion,” Hackett says, and something inside Garrus clenches. “Suggested by your friend Dr. T’Soni, as I understand it. For now, the team has been relocated to the Citadel to continue their process. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, but the destruction of the inner Presidium is mighty inconvenient. I hear they’ve finally managed to reconnect what remains of the arms, however.”

“You’re not there now, sir?”

“I left a few months ago after the Council was resettled. I’m in the Bahak system, now, attempting to repair relations with what remains of the Hegemony. I’ll be here for the next week.”

That’s a bit of a surprise to Garrus, and apparently it is to Shepard, too.

“I — didn’t know much of the Hegemony survived, sir.”

“It didn’t,” he sighs heavily. “Approximately eighty-seven percent of the batarian race perished, was converted, or went missing, major governmental bodies included. Small-scale attempts trying to seize power are becoming more frequent and what remains of their elite needs help getting back on their feet. I’m also traveling there to personally set the record straight regarding Project Rho, in a gesture of goodwill.”

Shepard stares. Hackett stares back.

“I sent you into that mission alone as a personal favor to me. If the destruction of the Bahak system was inevitable, it was my word that ordered it.”

“Walking into batarian space to claim credit for the incident with the second-highest body count in their history sounds a lot like suicide, sir. What on earth for?”

Hackett’s mouth twitches into what might almost have been a smile. “You’re conveniently forgetting all of the times you’ve carried out similar orders yourself, or engaged in what would otherwise be political suicide to a lesser soldier.”

“Sir — ”

“They’re our neighbors, Captain,” Hackett says definitively. “And right now, our neighbors need help. Our ability to establish and maintain friendships with the rest of Council space is the only reason the human race survived the last thirty years, and it’ll be the only way we survive the upcoming centuries. We certainly wouldn’t have an Earth to come home to without the turian military or krogans’ support. Do you disagree with extending the same hand to the batarians?”

There’s an oddly strained silence.

“No, sir,” Shepard says finally. “Just be careful.”

“Naturally.” Hackett checks something on the side of his monitor. “I’m afraid I’m running out of time to make my shuttle to the docks. I will be out of contact for the next week until I make it to England, but do reach out to Admiral Boncelet on the Citadel if you — either of you — have any more questions about Project Legion.”

“Thanks for your time, sir,” Shepard says, and Garrus repeats the sentiment. A second later, the vid goes blank, and they are left staring quietly at an black screen.

“Some update,” Garrus says after a moment. “You might think they actually value our opinion.”

Shepard doesn’t respond. Her hands are pressed palms together in front of her face, still staring blankly at where Hackett’s image last blinked out.

“I was thinking the market down the road for lunch,” Garrus tries again. “Want to go get lost in that electronics bazaar after?”

“Sorry,” she says quietly, “not hungry.”

She’d barely touched her plate before they called his line. “Shepard.”

“I — remembered something.”

Garrus looks at her for a moment. “You mean from the Catalyst?”

“It — yes.” She stands and slowly wanders across the length of the room, an old shadow of her habit of pacing the loft back on the Normandy SR-2. “It’s faint. For a long while I thought I dreamt it. But I remembered…”

She looks outside the balcony window, at the characteristically gray clouds of southern England, then turns, frustrated, and sinks into the armchair next to the balcony doors. “What kind of goddamn terrace house needs a balcony,” she mutters.

Trying hard to prevent himself from growing impatient, Garrus says, “What do you remember?”

“That’s just it, I’m not sure. If I called up Hackett and said I remember something that might have been a hallucination — it was a struggle to think even before I reached the beam, and then the Illusive Man made it worse — ”

“Wait — the Illusive Man?”

“I can’t believe I didn’t remember him,” she says quietly, as if to herself. “I… I reached the beam, and someone was saying nobody had made it. I think I was shot again… But I heard Anderson’s voice. There was this long… walk. The floor sloped up. I couldn’t stand a few times. I reached the top and saw Anderson, then…”

She hisses and scrubs furiously at her forehead with one hand.

“I lose it here,” she snarls. “Every time I try to remember. I lose it right here. I can’t get at what happens after. Just a vague sort of… sense that something was wrong. I did this. Right?”

“You activated it,” Garrus says encouragingly. “Hackett heard your voice. About ten minutes later, the Crucible went off. ” _He said you sounded in pain. He said you were quiet for so long we thought you had died, and then your voice was on the line, asking for the next order_ _—_

“I don’t remember that. I just remember Anderson’s — him, and I was looking up at the world through the glass, thinking it was over…” She looks at him through the gaps in her many fingers; he meets her eyes. “The Illusive Man _was_ there. I’m sure of it now.”

Garrus keeps her gaze, uncertain of what to make of this. “Did he attack you?”

“N — yes,” she says, the pauses. “No. Not exactly. He did — something. I… He was too far gone. He put a gun to his head. It ended there. I’m sorry, Garrus, I’m trying to separate what he did from what happened later — ” _Later?_ “ — but the part that… the time I thought I imagined, the most important part, was with this… kid.”

He’s well and truly flummoxed now. “Kid?”

“It wasn’t a real kid — it was the Catalyst.” She waves a hand. “It spoke to me. It said I… there was a choice.”

Garrus closes his eyes. This is reminding him of his C-Sec days, trying to piece together a timeline of events from unreliable testimonies, witnesses that were high or under the influence or still in shock from trauma. But Shepard does her best. If nothing else in this galaxy, he believes in that. “A choice for what?”

“How to…” She glances up at him. “I know this sounds ridiculous.”

“I’m listening, Shepard.”

“There was — there were options. I think it was in the Crucible’s programming. The Reaper threat could be ended one of three ways.” She swallows. “I chose to destroy them. Their programming.”

Garrus blinks. What other choices could there have been, he thinks, to tempt her otherwise? What other options would the ones who came before, the engineers of previous cycles, have programmed within the Crucible’s capabilities?

Unless —  
  
Her earlier behavior comes back to him, and something clicks. “It destroyed the Reapers,” Garrus says slowly, “at the cost of the geth as well?” A pause. “EDI?”

“I thought, fuck it,” Shepard mutters. “I’m half tech myself. It may destroy me too. But if it… if it ends it, then isn’t it worth it?”

Garrus doesn’t have an answer. He doesn’t know if he would have answered differently six months ago when Shepard was still in hospital, still couldn’t move from her bed without pain; doesn’t know if he would have answered differently during that time they’d spent stranded in Heptos without EDI and devoid of all communications outside the Normandy. He knows for sure that he wouldn’t have thought it worth it, to lose Shepard at the cost of the Reapers, that moment she ran from him in the shuttle bay as Tali dragged him back inside.

These are questions for another lifetime. The worst has passed, and they are alive. That’s enough.

Garrus rises and joins her at her armchair, taking her hand in his. “You want to see what they’re up to on the Citadel, then?”

Shepard looks up at him with wide eyes as though all talk of leaving Earth, leaving London, leaving this very room, hadn’t existed before now. “I think,” she says finally, “that I want to hear it from Liara first.” 

* * *

“I’d feel better if we had Tali on it,” Shepard says three hours later. She’s fiddling with the dial on the console, but so far has only succeeded in drawing a static film from the speaker to speak over Liara’s voice. The only thing preventing Garrus from reaching over and dragging her from the dial is keeping his hands remaining steady at ten-and-two on the steering wheel.

“Tali’s speciality is hacking, not geth programming,” Garrus adds, but concedes, “though you’re right, she should be involved. Liara?”

“She’s been difficult to maintain a secure connection with,” Liara confesses over the comm line within the car radio. “Rannoch doesn’t have a powerful enough communication tower to transmit audio outside their own system. But I’ll let her know on the next available data wave. Since the geth went offline, most of their systems have gone unused, along with the knowledge on how to use them. The quarians mostly had to start from scratch. Those that are working on it, anyway,” she adds. “There’s… not as much interest as one would hope.”

“Send an agent directly if you have to,” Shepard instructs. “Even if she’s busy, someone who knew Legion and EDI should be on that team, at least in an advisory sense.”

The line is silent for a moment, and then Liara’s voice says: “I agree, Shepard. I’ll keep an eye out and pull some strings.”

“This raises a question,” Garrus says as he directs the skycar upward to avoid a church tower. Shepard peers out the window down below.  “Liara, you knew about this, didn’t you?”

This time, he can easily imagine the look on Liara’s face as if she were sitting in the car with them: pinched, guilty. “I,” her voice begins — static drains her out. Shepard reaches again for the knob and clears it up in time to hear: “ — so many rumors of solutions to save the geth, none of them are really all that credible. I’ve kept on top of all of them, but this was the only one that seemed… feasible. Hackett reached out, and I provided the data I had on Legion, but I didn’t want to… give any false hope in case it doesn’t work out.”

“We’re grownups, Liara,” Shepard says wryly. “We can handle a little bad news.”

“Though her definition of ‘handling bad news’ tends to end up with a shotgun in someone’s face,” Garrus adds, “she’s right. Shepard can’t rush in to save the day and push the trigger button if she doesn’t know what’s going on.”

“Shut it.”

“You’re not — what are you two going to do? The team is being relocated to the Citadel.”

“Coincidentally, that’s where we’re heading soon. Probably.”

“Hopefully.”

“Shepard, you’re getting knighted next week,” Liara says, a bit admonishingly. Neither of them ask how she knows. “Didn’t they tell you?”

“Don’t remind me,” Shepard grunts.

“You’re going to turn it down?”

“Haven’t decided.” Cramped in the seat, Shepard stretches her left leg out and rubs the knee. “They already promoted me without my consent, I feel I’m long overdue to raise hell about one thing or the other.”

“You’d better hope she doesn’t accept, Garrus,” Liara says with a sudden hint of mischievousness. “We’ll all have to call her ‘Dame’ soon enough.”

“I’m not even a British citizen anymore,” Shepard says again.

“Which title would come first, do you think?” Garrus curves the car to avoid a small flock of birds. “All together with the Spectrehood _and_ the Council seat, just imagine your taxes in a few years, Shepard.”

“Swear to god,” Shepard laughs a little. Liara chuckles a little over the speaker, static cracking.

“Well, the Normandy is still grounded here,” she says. “At least until someone convinces Hackett it’s needed elsewhere so they can get a move on with these repairs. That person could be you, if you want us there. And I’m sure wherever the Normandy goes, Joker will jump at the chance to pilot it, even if it’s just to the Citadel. He’s been complaining nonstop in his emails to James about the plastic seats on the _Ballarat_.”

“Not sure what good the Normandy will do outside the system,” Shepard says thoughtfully. “It’s a warship.”

“With the most advanced stealth system in the galaxy,” Garrus feels inclined to point out. “Besides, we built it for use when we weren’t at war. Put it to work in the Terminus making contact with dark colonies.”

“Not until these engines are settled, I’m afraid.” Liara sighs. “They’re making progress, but it’s slow. After all the beatings the ship’s taken, there are talks of replacing the core.”

“T’Soni,” Garrus says immediately, “I trust that you would strike the appropriate amount of Shadow Broker terror into anybody who tries to put their hands on the Thanix.”

“I’ll do my best, Garrus,” she says dryly. “It is sometimes difficult to imagine how this ship was ever built in the first place without your and Tali’s approval.”

Liara is frustrating, Garrus thinks as Shepard laughs, because knowing her for four years as he has, he still has occasional trouble deciding when she is joking.

“Shepard,” Liara says over the line. “I meant to tell you. Do you know what some of the most popular extranet search terms have become lately?”

“I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”

“ _‘commander shepard alive,’ ‘commander shepard dead,’ ‘commander shepard alliance,_ ’’” she recites. Beside him, Shepard goes quiet. “Nearly all of the human colonies in the Alliance space are fully-functional again. Babies are being named after you already. A few aren’t human, even. I’ve also seen a significant rise in the search phrase ‘ _commander shepard first name_.’”

She snorts. “Thanks, but ah, why are you telling me this?”

“Just that if you really want to go for the Council seat, I doubt you’ll face that much opposition,” Liara says, suddenly serious. “I think they’re looking for a familiar name for leadership. Might as well be yours, if you’re willing.”

“Didn’t get enough of me the first time?” she mutters. “Yeah. Thanks. Like I said, just for an interim until someone takes over. Still need to get cleared by Chakwas.”

“Speaking of,” Garrus says, pulling them down onto the hospital roof parking lot. “We’re here. And, uh, Liara — ” Garrus coughs. “Thanks. For earlier.”

Shepard looks at him curiously, but Liara says, “Oh. Ah. There’s no need, Garrus. I’m sorry you didn’t see sooner.”

“No hard feelings. Talk to you later.”

“…All right. Stay in touch, guys. Hope I’ll see you soon.”

* * *

After receiving an earful from Karin about continuing to wander the city without consistent crutch or cane support (“I had the cane!” “But you didn’t _use_ it, Captain, which rather defeats the purpose.”), Garrus steps outside the doctor’s office to use the vending machine down the hall. Only to find it currently being assaulted by an surprisingly familiar pair of uniforms.

“Dios mio, this thing only takes coins? It’s the twenty-second century.”

“I think I’ve got some pence, hang tight.”

Vega’s large form bends down to the neon panel on the machine, squinting. “‘Pounds sterling.’ Don’t know what the hell that is.”

“We’ve been on leave here for the past eleven months and you still don’t know British currency?”

“Everyone uses chits these days. Why do they insist on using old coins? Hang on, let me try something.” Vega crouches down, attempting to shimmy himself between the machine and the wall — a difficult feat, for a well-built man over six feet tall. “Tali taught me how to open one of these things from the back — ”

“Can I help you gentlemen?” Garrus steps up behind them. “It seems to me like you’re trying to rob that vending machine. I’m afraid that’s a violation of — ”

“Piss off, mate.” James laughs and after extracting himself, he greets Garrus with a clasp on the shoulder. “Did that sound natural? Have we stayed on this island long enough?”

“It’d sound more natural without an American accent,” Steve says. “Hey, Garrus. What brings you here?”

“Shepard’s latest attempt to convince Chakwas to sign off on her med leave forms. Also, I’m going to drag her to the lab for some bloodwork later. Might need some muscle to help.” He looks pointedly at James, who raises his hands.

“Make Lola do something she don’t want? You’re on your own, Scars.”

“Anyway. What’re you here for?”

“Visiting the kids down the hall.” Steve’s voice drops a respectful degree lower. “A lot of them don’t get visitors. We get together with some other officers off duty and read to ‘em.”

“That’s good,” Garrus says genuinely. “Not too many of them will be stuck in here for long, I hope?”

Steve shrugs. “It’s been almost a year. They’re either here because the child centers are full, no guardians have claimed them, or they’re in for a long recovery. Either way, no one to look out for them.”

It never gets easier, thinking about the children. Garrus had considered volunteering to help with orphaned kids himself, but — he knows the sight of an alien, even an ally race like the turians, might send some human children into hysterics. Not counting the sight of a violently scarred alien, what with the remaining damage to his face and his latest scars from the war; not a pleasant idea in the end. 

“Got it!”

Garrus turns; Down the hall, Shepard is waving a datapad with one hand and leaning on the cane with the other. She limps unsteadily but swiftly down toward them. “Another fortnight and I’m _gone_. Let’s — Vega?”

“Good to see you out and around, Lola.” He moves to hug her, then hesitates a fraction too long; Shepard yanks him down into an embrace, slapping his back hard. James glances down at her leg. “You want to sit down?”

Shepard waves aside the question. “I was just thinking of food, actually. Good to see you two. You want to join us?”

“Sounds good. I’m getting tired of rations. There’s a center market down the road with new vendors, though. Mostly levo, but should be some dextro for the dinosaur here.”

Cortez leads the way through the hospital corridors, chatting with James about what Garrus thinks is a continuation of the British currency discussion. It takes Garrus several moments to realize Shepard is no longer walking next to him. He’s learned to slow his steps since her release from the hospital to match her pace, but he turns — and she’s several meters behind him, staring at her omnitool with the look he’s come to associate with bad news.

He steps back toward her, gut clenched. “Everything good?”

“I need to do something,” Shepard says suddenly. “Just one last thing before we go to the Citadel.”

Garrus doesn’t move. “Now?”

“No,” she says quickly. Her eyes are still glued to her tool. “I’ll do it tomorrow. But thanks.”

The end of a conversation if he’s ever heard one. Unsatisfied but not willing to push it, Garrus offers his arm. He feels something tighten in him when she hesitates just a moment before taking it.

They eat dinner with Cortez and Vega in an outdoor market a few blocks down the road, across the street from a massive construction site, now silent and dark with its workers off duty. In the wake of the war, places like hospitals have become the newest centers for trade, commerce, and news reporting. In the daytime, these makeshift town squares see barterers and trading stalls, not unlike the one near their place in Islington. In the dark blue-green haze of the evening, the area is lit only with ancient, scavenged string-lights and the occasional orange street lamp in an effort to save electricity. 

It reminds him of some areas of Omega, oddly, without the violence and paranoia. Enough time has passed for the people in this area to feel assured of their continued survival, but not enough to strike the feeling of loss, the unspoken question of _When will we get back to normal?_ that everybody hopes someone with a name and power will answer over the radio, _Sooner than you think_.

Garrus doubts anybody has that answer. _Normal_ seemed an abstract, foreign concept to him even before the Reapers; normal became the threat of Saren and the Collectors looming overhead while serving on the Normandy with a group of strangers and aliens; normal became living with the knowledge that Shepard is dead; normal became his crew on Omega, it became finding home again when N7 blinked into his scope across the bridge. Normal became his new face, EDI’s companionship then body then death; Shepard’s coma; her new scars; then accepting, finally, the fact that the Reapers are gone and now all that’s left is the recovery.

And after that, what then?

After that, he knows, there’s the climb, the one they’re all a part of.

Cortez finds an ancient picnic table in a quiet, secluded spot away from the buzz of the center square surrounded by architecture that looks old enough to have seen the dawn of several centuries. Vega wanders off to a vendor across the street with the shortest line, advertising some kind of human food with a grill that blows occasional gusts of smoke down the avenue.

“How’s the leg, ma'am?”

“Better than you last saw it.”

“You look well,” Cortez says. “It’s good to see you up and around.”

“I’d feel even better if they’d let me have my L5s back,” Shepard grumbles, but Garrus has overheard this argument so many times with Chakwas, he knows to keep his disapproval to himself. “Not sure if that’s ever happening, though.”

“Welcome to the life of a non-biotic, Battlemaster,” Garrus says.

“A formerly biotic, twice-dead human cyborg,” Shepard complains. “Somehow it’s the non-biotic thing that bothers me the most.”

“We get by all right.” Cortez seems amused. “So you’re cleared from leave?”

“Sort of. Karin cleared me for light admin duty if I keep up with PT and prove to her I won’t pull the knee again in the next two weeks,” Shepard explains. “But Hackett’s to approve it. I want to tell him I’m traveling with my doctor, so I’m trying to convince her to relocate to the Citadel with me. But I think her idea of ‘Shepard at desk duty’ somehow mistranslated as ‘Shepard single-handedly taking out a pirate ship on her lonesome.’”

“To be fair,” Garrus says as Vega returns with two takeaway bags in one hand, a six-pack of beer dangling from the other. “You in politics might very well morph into you single-handedly fixing every problem on the Citadel with a Vindicator and no backup.”

“Wait, what?” Vega stops at the table. “Politics?”

Shepard shoots him a look. “Way to keep a secret.”

“Saving everyone some time.”

Steve and James listen patiently as Shepard explains, during which time Garrus hears someone’s stomach growl. When she’s done, Steve blows out a surprised whistle. “I guess,” he says slowly, “it’s not the most unbelievable thing that’s happened.”

“That’s it? No comment about how much we hate the Council?” Shepard digs into the levo bag and pulls out plastic cutlery, rationed water, and a plastic carton full of some crimson-colored human food.

“Estás loca, Commander,” James says. “You always were. Hey, at least now we know someone on the Council will listen to us. But I guess that means no party?”

She shakes her head. “You’re always welcome to come with us, James. Unless they’re deploying you?”

“I’m clear for duty, but nobody needs me, if you can believe it.” He shakes his head. “Volunteers on the ground, leaves all the military out doing actual work in galactic space. Might visit Traynor in Essex, then see what’s going in Rio.”

“Did they ever get N-school up and running?”

“No,” James says, a bit petulantly to Garrus’s ears. “That’s why I’m going down there to make sure it happens. I didn’t get accepted for nothing.”

Steve laughs and Shepard gives a wry smile.

The conversation changes, and the street lights get dimmer as the evening goes on — a method of conserving of energy that has become more common over the past year — and Garrus finds an odd peace in this moment, even if he’s a long way from home, even if his mother is dead, even if many more are still missing.

As James and Shepard continue their discussion of N-training, led mostly by James’s outlying his plans, Cortez catches his eye.

“Almost forgot, I wanted to show you something,” Steve says and reaches into his shoulder bag. He pulls out a datapad and taps for a few minutes, then hands it over. “Got one of these from Hackett last month.”

Garrus blinks.

On the screen is a picture of a M6-Baiji in a large garage, and a list of specs. The Baiji, one of many convenience auto models that had grown popular on the Presidium in particular, had been scheduled for release approximately a year and a half ago but had been halted, like most things, with the return of the Reapers.

“Hackett _gave_ you one of these?”

“They found a warehouse of about five hundred of them on Kalpera,” Cortez explains. “Never shipped out. Not much use for ‘em after the war, and no market anymore, so I think they’re giving them out to pilots who flew in the final attack on Earth. Joker turned his down so Hackett gave it to me.”

“Huh. Congrats.”

“Garrus.” Cortez shakes his head. “What the hell am I going to use a live-in corvette for? I’ll be piloting whatever they tell me to and napping in hotels on the Citadel for the foreseeable future. I figured you and Shepard could use it.”

Garrus stares at him. “You realize you’re offering me a half-a-million credit starship. The type that B-list celebrities have parked in their private garages. Politicians take these for scenic vacations touring the Rema Belt every weekend.”

“You’ll need to get to the Citadel somehow. One condition, though: I want to be the first one to drive it. Can I come with you?”

Garrus laughs. “All right. Shit, I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this. What the hell are we going to do with a starship?”

“It’s not actually that big, I saw the inside — it’s in a lot down in Sussex. I know you’d want to strap some cannons as soon as possible, but I have to warn you, I’m not sure it’ll lift off with all the weight.”

“It’ll be a tight fit,” Garrus muses, “with us and Chakwas. Shepard’ll only get the sign off to leave if her doc is traveling with her.”

Steve hmm’s and takes a swig of his beer. Next to them, Vega laughs at something Shepard has said, who gives a wry smile in response. “There’ll be enough room if we squeeze. Just don’t bring any pets.”

“Speaking of pets,” James says suddenly. “Have I introduced you to mine?”

“Sorry?”

James digs into his pockets and pulls out a small holo. “Made it official a few weeks ago. Apartment starts getting lonely alone, right? So I heard about this rescue center…”

Shepard aww’s appropriately at the picture of two dogs, shot within what appears to be Vega’s temporary apartment in Chelsea. One small, brown dog is napping on a footstool with its belly up; another larger dog with a black coat is facing the camera, pointed face looking to the camera in puzzled interest.

“Dingo’s on the left, he’s the brute that nearly bit my hand off when I met him. Now he sleeps in my bed every night and drools on my boots. Sassy’s the one on the stool.”

“‘Sassy’?”

“It was on her collar,” James says defensively. “I’m not rechristening a dog with a proper name.”

“I didn’t realize so many pets were still — well.” Garrus searches for the polite way to say it. “Around.”

“Not a lot of them are,” James says, flipping the image to another photo of them wrestling in his living room. “Plenty of cats didn’t make it. Loners, but they don’t know how to survive feral, you know? I’m allergic, otherwise I’d take some in. I’m taking a lot of dogs until they can find homes, but I couldn’t give away these two. Hey if anybody on the Citadel wants a pet, you point them my way, ¿entiéndeme?”

“Don’t know if I can afford to take you up on that,” Shepard says. “No room. Garrus already hogs the covers.”

Garrus smiles good-humoredly as the others have a chuckle at his expense. The smirk doesn’t quite reach her eyes, he notices, but he prevents himself from getting too curious. He’s fairly certain that whatever is bothering Shepard has to do with what she’d read — or seen — on her tool earlier that evening, but he know when to press, and she’s allowed her secrets. They have a plan, and one day, things will be fine.

* * *

When Garrus wakes the next morning, Shepard is gone.

She’s not in her bedroom. Her cane is missing, crutches lying by the bed. A call to Chakwas confirms that she hasn’t checked into the hospital. She isn’t answering his calls. Her omnitool’s tracking sensor has been disabled. The only thing preventing him from hot-wiring a damn car and scouring all of England to find her himself is the — the unsettling, gut-wrenching sense that tells him maybe this is it, this thing she had to do — maybe he’s not meant to follow this time.

To distract himself, he spends the morning cleaning.

With both of them accustomed to cleanliness from after so many years in the military, they’ve kept the place in nearly the exact same condition as they’d found it, so much so that several rooms still look untouched. Garrus gives every corner a look-over regardless and surprisingly finds several things to keep him busy: he clears out some sort of large spider-looking thing from the ground floor water closet, reorganizes both of their first aid kits upon discovery that a bottle of her pills has found its way into his things, and repairs the squeaky leg of the kitchen table he’s always been meaning to fix.

By 11, he’s made and eaten breakfast, finalized his list of the MIA turian units in the Greater London area before sending it off to Hierarchy Records Bureau, and has run out of things to do that don’t involve checking his inbox for the fifteenth time. There’s still no word from Shepard.

He’s considering going for a run to ease his anxiety when his omnitool lights up at 11:02 with a notification. He opens it hurriedly —

It’s from Quentius.

…Right. Quentius. Okay.

Garrus stares at the sender for a moment — _FROM THE OFFICE OF THE COUNCIL_ — and takes a deep breath, then opens it.

When he’s finished reading, he takes his tool off and scrubs a hand over his face.

If he wants the job, then they want him in as soon as possible. To politicians and soldiers, that means _immediately_. It means _yesterday_. They’re hoping for his relocation within a fortnight.

And he’s going to take it, he thinks suddenly, because he’s damn good at what he does and he’s got the records — and the scars — to prove it. Hell, he’s got the _Primarch_ backing his candidacy.

Garrus thinks over the list of responsibilities again. On call at any time. The salary is a number with zeros to the point of absurdity, of course, but besides that, it doesn’t sound dissimilar from his later police work, just on a galactic scale. His sector will be larger, his targets greater. His successes grander. His risks greater; his failures more catastrophic.

His father would certainly be proud. Hell, he’d be proud of himself. This is what he’s wanted — doing what needs to be done, effecting change at a higher level, now with the political backing and funding to do so. There really is no “next step” for someone of his skills, passion, and calibre. The only position one might consider higher would be… Well, Spectre.

One Spectre in the relationship is enough, he thinks, for now.

At 11:18AM, he receives another ping. It’s —

_Don’t freak out. I just dropped her off. They’re at the Royal London Cemetery. I’d give it a while._

Cortez.

...They?

Garrus waits. If Steve isn’t concerned, then perhaps he shouldn’t be. Shepard had said she needed to take care of something.

Cemetary. Why the hell would she — with someone else, a _plural_ — be in a cemetery?

He gives it three more hours of a tasteless lunch and tense, worried pacing, and at 3PM he finally heads outside, down the street, and starts up an abandoned skycar’s ignition.

* * *

 

The cemetery’s address isn’t hard to find on the extranet, but the steady threat of rain dogs him for the first half-hour of the drive. After that, he follows the long, winding road from the entryway into the low hills. Keeping the car low to the ground, he spots the occasional family or lone civilian paying respects to lost families or friends. The heavy clouds have given way to fog down here; while squinting through it makes searching for Shepard harder, he decides against flying higher for a better view, unwilling to disrupt the quiet peace here.

Cemeteries have always felt — he searches for a proper term for his unease. He’s never felt comfortable, really, with the idea that humans maintain and beautify a physical location to visit their dead. So many of his species die in combat or off planet, their physical remains unsalvageable or in such poor state upon recovery that the prospect of anything other than cremation for a turian is enough to inspire gossip. His kind is remembered in spirit, in their literature, in memorials and epics.

The fog in this place adds to his discomfort. He has his Mantis in the backseat, yet he doesn't expect he’ll need it; there’s just something odd about it. The dead, physically underfoot. Impractical. Unnerving.

On his right, he sees a young human girl and what looks to be her grandmother entering a gated tract of land. The girl holds a bouquet in her hand, and Garrus is struck with an immediate guilt. He should have brought something. He’s brought his gun and a million questions, but nothing out of respect for… whatever Shepard is here for.

Garrus drives by an abandoned human motorbike, but he stops the car when he sees two familiar — one of them unbelievable — figures standing in the distance underneath a wide tree, within an otherwise unremarkable section of the cemetery. He turns off the ignition and steps out of the car, but doesn’t move any further. He leans up against the side and waits.

After some time, one figure detaches from the other, and heads toward him. To his mild surprise, it’s Jack who joins him by the car. Her dark hair is longer now, but still shaved on the sides in what she had once described as a _undercut_ , and she has a fading pink scar on the right side of her skull, distorting some of the tattoos there. She’s wearing more clothes than he’s ever seen on her at once: long sleeves and pants accompanied by her old leather jacket, either out of respect for the cold or the dead. Her boots crush the fresh leaves on the roadside as she approaches.

“Jack,” Garrus greets politely.

She grunts out a greeting and takes out a package of cigarettes. “Want a smoke?”

He would remind her about dextro-levo compatibility, or the scent of human tobacco never agreeing with him, but the simple fact that she’s offered tells him now isn’t the time to talk, but to listen. He shakes his head.

Jack hops on the front of the car and lights one for herself, but doesn’t inhale. She stares back out at the lone figure standing at the tree.

“Kahlee died,” she says frankly. Her voice betrays nothing, but something tells Garrus several of his questions will be answered shortly. He doesn’t reply.

“She was helping me with the kids, that last day,” Jack continues unprompted. “Two of the fuckin’ idiots ran off to the front lines alone. Sanders ran off to drag them back herself. Octavia didn’t make it.” She scrubs a hand furiously over her face. “We got her brother, but Kahlee… she’s been unresponsive since last July. And all her next of kin’s dead. So they asked me.”

It hits him at the worst times, the knowledge that for many people, this isn’t over. How lucky he’s been, to have everyone he knows accounted for, in life or death, and Shepard’s shot at life again becoming clearer with every passing day. For many people, the war never ended; it simply drags out until one day you can’t take anymore, until one day you decide to pull the plug on someone you never thought you could lose.

“No ceremony?” Garrus keeps his voice low.

“Shepard’s the only one who would’ve fucking come anyway,” Jack snaps, and Garrus decides not to mention that several of their surviving crewmembers, not to mention the students of Grissom, would have gladly attended had they known. It’s very likely Jack told only Shepard to avoid precisely that. “The kids didn’t — I sent ‘em off to Rio, I told them we just lost her. They’re rebuilding the Brazillian HQ, then some of them wanna enroll in N-school. What else do you do with biotics except fight, right?”

Garrus has delivered bad news to families, comforted grieving loved ones; an unfortunate reality of his work in C-Sec. He’s familiar with the handbook of things you’re meant to say, the list of topics to avoid. It never gets easier.

“I think they’d’ve liked to come, if they knew,” he says quietly.

“She’s not even here.” Jack waves an arm with her lit cigarette and some ash falls. It’s a gesture clearly meant to encompass _everything_ : the graveyard, the plot, the universe itself. “She was cremated. She wanted to be. We all did. Don’t think I know anyone who fought who didn’t. Who’s got time for a funeral after all this?”

Garrus flashes back to that moment on the SR-2, after the crash had landed them in Heptos. The moment of silence the crew had insisted on taking for Shepard, before getting back to work repairing the damage of the surprise landing. They’d just lost EDI. Garrus had taken her body himself and laid it in the AI core before anyone could notice. The Alliance had just confirmed Anderson’s death and Shepard remained MIA. Ashley, as XO, had handed him a plaque for Shepard, and he couldn’t —

He doesn’t know where it ended up. He hopes someone snapped it in half.

“Shepard’s got — ” Jack stops, then shakes her head furiously and stomps on the cigarette. “Just go talk to her. She’s up there moping and shit, and I didn’t know what to do.”

Garrus looks at her. “What’d she tell you?”

“She hasn’t told me jackshit.” She shrugs her thin shoulders. “But she hasn’t been to see Anderson yet, so I figure she’s got a lot of mourning to catch up to the rest of us. Plus there’s that kid buried with him up there, and I ain’t touching that.”

 _Kid_ , Garrus wonders, but Jack is already pushing off the car and heading down the road, hands stuffed into her pockets. “You need a lift?” he calls.

“I’m parked down the road. I took Zaeed’s bike.” She stops and turns around to look at him, then for some reason, continues suddenly: “It’s an antique Harley Davidson, a fancy old human brand. He probably stole it from a dealer’s warehouse. He told me where he kept it locked up, a few weeks before we all came back to Earth. Said it was mine, or Shepard’s, if he didn’t make it out.”

Garrus watches her.

“I haven’t seen him since that last fight,” Jack says after a moment, and there’s a different tone in her voice now, something he might almost call hopeful, as she looks at him one last time. “You?”

He shakes his head. And then, because the thought of ending on this note is too unsettling, he adds, “He survived a gunshot to the skull. I’m sure he’ll turn up.”

“Yeah. Tough bastard.” Jack tugs on her ponytail a bit, then turns away once more, and heads down the road into the fog. “Later.”

Garrus waits until she’s out of sight, and then looks back at Shepard’s figure on the hill. She hasn’t moved.

It might be prudent, he realizes suddenly, to wait for her here, until she’s ready to leave. Like her childhood on Earth, her parental-like relationship with Anderson and the subsequent loss of his companionship have been just a few things in her personal life, like her pre-service history, that have never felt welcome to his commentary or sympathy.

How have they arrived here, Garrus thinks suddenly, for him to second-guess every gesture he thinks to make, every reach of comfort he wants to give? Has Shepard ever minced her words or hesitated for him?

It’s different, says a conscience that sounds suspiciously like the urge that had convinced him back to C-Sec after Sovereign, the one he had pacified him after passing up Spectre training as a teenager. His father’s influence, perhaps. Shepard has been his commanding officer for the trajectory of their relationship, his lover for only a fraction of that time. Garrus had respected her long before he loved her.

And Shepard has never asked for his comfort, once, in their history together, only ever accepted it cautiously once offered. Perhaps someone who knows her less might have understood that to mean she didn’t want it. But theirs has been a partnership of wordless solidarity, undefined but unshakeable, ever since the second he’d taken off his helmet and said “I thought you were dead,” only realizing in that moment that he no longer believed it.

If their situations were reversed, and they were stranded on Palaven — if he had told her of his mother when it happened, the day his father finally called to say _we lost her_ — Shepard would have ensured he wouldn’t have mourned alone.

Garrus begins the slow ascent into the cemetery park, where she stands with her cane. The mist is beginning to turn into a light, cool haze. He stops a few steps behind her back. If she knows he’s there — surely she does, he hasn’t been quiet — she doesn’t give any indication.

“You want to talk about it?” he asks after a few moments.

“Talk about my dead family?” Shepard says flatly, then immediately contrite: “Sorry. I just — haven’t ever, before.”

Garrus steps up beside her and waits. With her cane, she motions silently to the graves. There are only three in front of them, stranded stones in what seems enough empty space to bury a large family.

“His ex-wife's buried in Atlanta,” she says calmly. “But I think he wanted to be with his parents. He never said so, but he always struck me as the kind of guy who wanted a big family.” She gestures to a series of stones on their left, organized in two neat rows. “I think he always hoped Cynthia and his future kids would want to be buried here, too, so he reserved all this land…”

Several of the stones on the left, he sees, say _Killed in Service_ , with a corresponding Alliance icon designating their rank and status, in their top-right corner. Garrus looks back at the empty stretch of grass they’re standing on. Three headstones. David Anderson, Kahlee Sanders, and… a few spaces to the right, one he doesn’t recognize. Rou.

“They never recovered him, did they?” Shepard says. “So I guess all this is just symbolic, you know, for us. Nobody’s really here.”

Garrus looks down at the third headstone, the unfamiliar name: _Rou, 2159-2172._ No last name. Where the others have what looks like a quote, an engraved sentence or poem of mourning, the rest of her stone is blank. It’s older than the others; weathered, simply cut, with no adornments and little care. The only indication anybody has visited it in years are the fresh flowers that now lie over the bottom edge.

“You knew her?” he asks quietly.

Shepard sighs again. “My — er. We weren’t biological, but… I liked to think of her as my sister.” She looks troubled, frowning down at the stone. “I think we just wanted to be. Two girls from the orphanage who ran away together. Young girls get adopted, you know? Tons of families wanted her. But she didn’t want to go without me, and… I was afraid she’d get adopted and I’d be alone. I — shit, Garrus, I haven’t thought about this in years. I convinced her to come with me, I said, we’ll make our own way, and she fu — she believed me, that I’d make life better for her, because I’d be her older sister. I’d take care of her.”

Shepard scrubs furiously at her face with her right hand. “Sorry. I haven’t talked about this in a long while. Anderson paid for the damn headstone after he found out.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No, he — I had an off day back in basic, I don’t remember. I punched someone’s lights out, they were running their mouth about my odds of surviving the year.” At his look, she shrugs one shoulder. “I was small, undernourished. The captain asked me what was really going on, so I said I’d just lost my sister, and instead of sending me to a damn therapist he said we can talk when you’re ready, and I never did. I was too embarrassed. And then he dropped a thousand pounds to give her a nice plot in her memory. I didn’t realize it was next to his family. Like she died of cancer or a skycar accident or something, not like I’d gotten her killed in a fucking turf war. I was so — _embarrassed_ , I couldn’t afford a gravestone, and I never properly thanked him. I just didn’t know what to say. How do you talk to someone about that? Who can put a finger on the most important part of you without trying?”

“I don’t know,” Garrus says quietly, not looking at her anymore. “After spending so much time alone, you kind of welcome it.”

She looks up at him. Her eyes are — wet, and he’s done _comforting_ before, even done _comforting Shepard_ before, but this is something else. This will require more of him that he’s not certain how to give.

Garrus tries gently, “I think he understood, Shepard. You paid him back in loyalty.”

Shepard doesn’t say anything for a long moment. He reaches forward and gently places his arm around her; the skin of her arm feels cold. She leans into his side.

“Weird,” she says eventually. “How we start out. I really thought — back then, it was just gonna be the two of us, forever, no matter what happened to the rest of the galaxy. Now here I am thinking the same about you.”

Garrus squeezes harder.

One of Shepard’s hands is still leaning hard on the cane. Her free arm comes up to wrap around his back. “She wanted to see the universe. We were gonna steal a starship and fly to the Citadel.”

“Planning your first tour?” Garrus asks, and to his relief, she huffs out a smile.

“Christ,” she says, “She was thirteen. I can’t believe I was ever that young. And she’s — she’s still thirteen, you know? I’m thirty-three now and she’s always going to be thirteen. And when I’m seventy she’ll still be thirteen, and Anderson’s always going to be — I don’t know,” she laughs suddenly. “I didn’t know how old he was until I saw this headstone. I never thought to ask.”

“Shepard.”

“She was the first person I let down, Garrus. You know how that feels. Our team, our responsibility. It always — disgusted me, my CO on Akuze, he sacrificed a dozen men to distract the maws so he and the officers could make it to the shuttles. And he died anyway, the damn thing just shot straight out of the ground, swallowed the shuttle whole.” She swallows. “I lay in some hospital for two weeks after. I decided if I ever made rank, I was going to do better. I was going to take care of mine, and I’d get all of my team out alive. It’s not about honor, it’s just what we need to do for each other. Nobody does it alone. But here they are. And here I am.”

Growing up, Garrus had learned how often death is treated as a prerequisite to respect. Honor in sacrifice; you die for the cause. _Our lives don’t end when our hearts do_ , his father would have said. _We go back to what made us. Those that remain will mourn, and our legacies are remembered for future generations. It makes them stronger for having known us. It makes our clan wiser. And we take it all with us, when we leave._

Shepard would have made an honorable turian. It’s a thought he’s had several times since knowing her. But she isn’t turian — she’s human, and just the difference has never felt so tangible.

It’s a good thing, now. Grief, he thinks — sometimes humans deal with that the proper way.

“I’m really sorry,” Shepard says quietly, “about your mum.”

He squeezes her hand.

“You did your team well, Shepard. All of them.” He lifts his other hand, runs a finger through her drifting hair to tuck it behind her ear. “And you will.”

Shepard tips her head into his crest, and Garrus loses count of the seconds as the fog slowly rolls in through the valley, then the wind gently blows it away. When she finally pulls from him, she doesn’t need the cane as he leads her back home.


	4. Chapter 4

  _Two weeks later_

“No! No, Garrus, don’t turn it off, I want to tell her — ”

“Sorry, Tali, I can’t hear you,” Garrus says loudly as he heads up the stairs. “Frequency’s terrible. Something on your end?”

“I — yo-r — — — bosh’tet!” The static cuts back in in. “— did-t — tell you a — ” Garrus frowns and fiddles with his tool; it doesn’t relent. Shit, he’d been _joking_. “ — on Rannoch, I’ve plotted out my — sh-a— — for y— and —pard — ”

The feed goes black. Garrus waits patiently for the line to reconnect, and is halfway toward heading back downstairs to find his toolkit when he receives a ping.

_It’s a problem on my end. I’ll figure it out. I have a house! Room for you and Shepard. Talk later on the Citadel. DON’T tell Shepard about you-know-what._

He shakes his head. Another ping follows shortly after:

_Okay, fine, tell her._

Garrus smiles and heads upstairs.

It’s five in the morning; neither of them have yet broken their habit of rising before the sun. Garrus, requiring less sleep on average, has been up since three, checking their luggage, giving every room one final sweep to tick off their boxes, and finally, waiting for Shepard to rise before Cortez meets them at seven.

When he opens Shepard’s bedroom door, only a single Alliance-standard traveling bag greets him. Light from the bathroom leads him to Shepard, who is sitting at the sink with a stool dragged upstairs from the kitchen. Tiny black things are scattered across the counter. She’s holding something metal next to her head and —

Garrus stares.

She has her back to him, but her eyes catch him in the mirror. “Hey,” she says without moving her head. Her head looks odder, almost like it used to, and he realizes the soft black stuff scattering the tile is hair. She moves the funny-looking blade to a lock of hair between her fingers on the other hand. “Does that look even in the back?”

“Uh.” He squints. It looks roughly the same length, if a little choppy. “I suppose so.”

“Helpful, Garrus.”

“It looks a lot like it used to,” he says honestly.

“That’s good enough.” She rises, packs the blade thing away, and sweeps the hair remains into a small wastebin. Her hair falls to her chin now, and she brushes it impatiently behind one ear. “Where’s that spare thermometer?”

  
“In my bag,” he says. “You know Chakwas will bring that sort of thing, and back-ups.”

Shepard rises and hobbles into the main bedroom with him. Her knee is still wrapped in a light bandage, though she claims the pain is gone so long as she’s certain not to push it. “I was self-sufficient without her for twenty-five years. With any luck I will be again one day.”

Garrus takes a seat on the bed. “Don’t let her hear you say that.”

“I love Karin, but she’s the mother I never had. For better or worse.”

“I’m sure she’d be touched. Would mean more to her than a knighthood, certainly.”

Shepard groans.

It had become something of a running joke between them. Last week, as he’d understood it, Shepard had stood in the middle of a red-carpeted office with several human dignitaries and an old woman in a clean white suit expectantly balancing a thin sword between her hands, and she had politely rejected the knighthood, instead requesting that David Anderson receive the honor posthumously. Garrus could only imagine how well that had gone down in the middle of the nation’s parliament.

“Can you do that?” Garrus had asked her on the way back to the house. He’d gladly waited by the car as she had accompanied Hackett inside, feeling as though he was intruding on a private human ceremony.

Shepard had shrugged and yawned.  “Came back from the dead twice. Anything’s possible.”

Garrus watches her now toss her remaining things into her bag and zip it up. He’s still a bit unnerved by the idea that humans cut their hair — doesn’t it hurt? — but he can see the appeal now. With her hair short again, falling around her face, she looks — not quite like she used to, but getting there. It’s something.

“You’re looking at me like I’ve done some human thing you don’t understand but you’re too embarrassed to ask about it.” She says all of this without looking up.

“Your hair,” he says simply. “Why cut it now?”

She pauses. “I guess… tradition.” She shakes her head. “I’m not sure what to call it. In real old times, it used to mean the person had been dishonored. Now, it’s — well, I guess it’s like a transition. Leaving an old life behind and starting over.”

“Like good luck?”

“Not quite.” She takes his hand with her left, metal fingers cool, and twists her mouth in what he wants to believe is almost a smile. “Bit more like hoping you’ll find it in the future.”

Garrus grips back.

As promised, Cortez arrives at seven on the dot today, and to Garrus’s amusement and Shepard’s indignance, when she moves to take the front seat, he quickly locks the front seat door. 

“You’re still listed as injured on my records, ma’am,” he says apologetically. “Back seat.”

“You’d think I’ve been wrapped in bubblewrap for the past seven weeks.” She opens the rear door, tosses her bag and cane in, and slides into the seat. “When I was last at the hospital, I apparently looked so pissed a secretary asked me if my nurse was _treating me properly_.”

Heading to the rear of the car, Garrus checks to make sure Cortez is occupied up at the front door of the rowhouse resetting the locks and shields, before leaning down into her rear seat. “And how has your nurse been treating you?” he mutters in her ear.

“Can’t complain,” she says lowly, “except in all the time we’ve stayed here, he didn’t let me and my boyfriend put that large bed to use even once.”

Feigning deafness, Garrus continues to the trunk to toss his things in the back next to Cortez’s duffel bag, then takes the seat in the front as Cortez heads back down to them. “I wonder when Chakwas will finally sign off on my request to let me sleep with my girlfriend,” he says conversationally.

Shepard kicks his seat.

“That better’ve been with your good foot.”

Cortez steps back into the car, closing the door. “Ready?” he asks, hands on the keys.

“More than,” Shepard says. “Thanks again, Steve.”

“It’s been a good time,” Steve says as they lift off. “But honestly, ma’am? I can’t wait to get out of this fishbowl.”

* * *

They stop at the hospital next, where Chakwas is set to meet them, and Shepard charges out of the back seat just to prove she can.

“She’s coming out front,” Steve says. “And you still shouldn’t be testing that leg.”

“Chakwas already cleared me.” Shepard stops at the curb, rubbing her knee. “She encouraged me. Hell, she _begged_ me to go. She couldn’t wait to sign off on my relocation request.”

“Which I only did on the assurance that even during your leave, you’ll continue your check-ups with me at Huerta, and keep your physical activity restricted to yoga and light runs for the next two months.” Chakwas comes up from behind them, a single rolling suitcase following her. She still looks as composed as ever, though it’s still strange for him to see her outside of the Normandy’s medbay. “Hello, Garrus.”

“Doctor. Thanks for agreeing to this.”

  
“Is that what she told you?” The doctor’s tone is disapproving, her raised eyebrow even moreso. “Hm.”

Garrus panics for a moment, wondering if he’s unintentionally landed Shepard in trouble. Shepard herself seems preoccupied with Cortez at the moment, having returned to chat over the roof of the skycar.

“Er.” For all their height difference, being on the receiving end of a look like that by a woman like Chakwas always seems harken back to his days in basic, being stared down by his recruitment officer.

“I was given approval to relocate to Huerta, as you know.” Chakwas snaps her suitcase handle down, then lifts it into the trunk where it fits neatly against Garrus’s bag. “I’m afraid I let Shepard persuade me against my better judgment. Hackett’s not eager to let her go.”

 _I’ll bet_ , Garrus thinks, admittedly a bit uncharitably. Out loud, he says, “I can imagine.”

“But he can’t keep her forever, I suppose.”

She seems oddly melancholy, watching her patient, and Garrus finds himself wondering if she’s had children. If she sees something in Shepard that reminds her of someone. He hadn’t even thought to ask if she’d had anyone to lose, in the war or before.

As soon as it’s come, the look is gone. “Just as well. She’ll enjoy knocking some political heads together on the Citadel, I imagine. Hackett can only do so much within the military.”

Garrus suddenly remembers that the Admiral is currently back within batarian space trying to broker peace, having returned to the Bahak system after the knighting ceremony. “How is that going, by the way?”

“As well as you might expect.” She waves her hand. “Some are calling for his head. The more intelligent representatives, if you ask me, are interested in drawing up a temporary pact of alliance while both parties recover from the war. The batarians will need protection as they recover what they can. Hackett’s pursuing that, last I heard. Military protection for resources and zero tolerance for their slavers who specialize in interracial, ah… trade.”

“Better than nothing.” Garrus moves to let her into the front seat — Shepard is already climbing back into the car, and Cortez is fooling around with something on his omnitool — but Chakwas grabs his hand before he can take a step further. 

“Garrus,” she says seriously, “how is she?”

Garrus pauses. Strangely, he recognizes that this is the first time he’s heard the question out loud since they had recovered her in the hospital. Garrus’s tool had been flooded with incoming calls from across the galaxy, all reservations for comm data forgotten, asking after Shepard’s wellbeing. He’d told them then what he’d heard from the doctors: _She lost a lot of blood. She’s in some pain. But she’s going to be okay,_ even when he wasn’t sure whether to believe it himself. Now, he thinks, the response should be simpler. Somehow it isn’t. How to summarize her health over the past month isn’t possible with words. She, like the rest of the galaxy, will simply have to wait and see for themselves.

“She’s gone a year without an explosion,” he finally decides. “We should get her a calendar.”

Chakwas taps her fist against his shoulder admonishingly, but he knows she understands.

As they climb into the car, Cortez is asking Shepard what her first movement as a councilor will be.

“I need to formally submit my name for consideration, first,” Shepard replies. “I sent some emails but figure it’s best to argue in person. And then I’m sure they’ll need to hem and haw before they agree, if they do. If not, I’ll just skip Plan A and get on with restructuring the Special Tactics and Reconnaissance COJ, I suppose.”

“There’s a justice committee for Spectres?” Cortez asks.

“No,” Shepard says wryly. “But that’s what I’m fixing first.”

Garrus recalls that majority of remaining Spectres are scattered throughout the galaxy; he realizes now that work on something like this will undoubtedly require travel.

“I agreed to accompany you to the Citadel, ma'am,” the doctor says from the front seat. Her mind has obviously made the same leaps as his. “This trip only has approval because we can truthfully claim you’re traveling with your doctor.”

“One day I dream of a world in which I can sneeze without Hackett’s say-so,” Shepard mutters next to him, but it’s without heat. Garrus pulls a bit of her hair back behind her ear like he’s seen her do a million times, and she smiles but doesn’t reply.

Garrus spends the ride catching up with the news in turian space on his data tablet, going over the welcome letter from Quentius’s office, reading his family’s congratulatory emails (something terrifying but warm awakens within him when his father mentions a possible visit to the Citadel as soon as it can be arranged), and when a new message pops into his inbox, he opens up Victus’s latest. With their upcoming arrival on the Citadel, Adrien has invited them to a small get-together. They’d just missed the summit the Council had held on the anniversary of the war’s end; much was said and not much was done, if Garrus is reading the Councilor’s statement and the tone of Adrien’s letters correctly. Sounds like there will be plenty to start on when they arrive.

When they arrive at the parking garage — a large, nearly abandoned lot sitting next to a small pond overgrown with weeds — Cortez lands on the top level, hands the keys off to the guard that had waved them onto landing, and gives them a quick tour of the corvette. Or tries to: when he unlocks the door of the Baiji, an oval-shaped VI flickers into life in the center of the doorway.

“Greetings, [CUSTOMER NAME]!” Garrus doesn’t know how it sounds to his human companions, but the VI sounds pleasantly androgynous to his ears, if a bit higher-pitched than most. “Welcome to your state-of-the-art Baiji. I am the Auto-Piloting Virtual Intelligence, AVI. You may adjust me to respond to any chosen verbal command in your control panel. Allow me to give you a tour of your new home away from home.”

“How creative,” Shepard mutters. “Who named this thing?”

“I’ll fool with the settings later,” Garrus mutters back.

The VI introduces the small but neatly sized corvette: two rooms, a kitchenette, a restroom the size of a closet, and a ladder in the back leading to the lower level containing storage and the engine. The space reads very human with its chairs and beds — Shepard glances apologetically in his direction, but if human furniture were a deal-breaker, he’d hardly have volunteered to remain on the SR-2 after Victus returned to Menae during the war. As it is, the corvette will be certainly be cramped with four adults, but it seems ideal for a small family; more than enough for a couple looking to get away for the weekend.

“Thank you for inputting your destination coordinates,” The VI joins him and Steve at the cockpit, where he’s been watching Steve explore the pilot’s seat. “You can adjust the temperature, lighting, and settings in the display panel next to the door.” It begins to drift into said panel, flickering light blue. “I shall alert you in the case of an emergency by turning the interior lights ORANGE for concerns requiring your attention, or RED for emergencies. You have deactivated autopilot, so I will now enter sleep mode. If I may be of assistance, please call on me at any time. Have a pleasant journey to THE CITADEL.”

Garrus looks around and tries to imagine the two of them living here, imagine him packing up and dragging Shepard away from the Citadel when work has gotten too overwhelming for either of them. It’s not hard. What might be harder is imagining them finding a way to remain stationary on the Citadel, really, after knowing what it really is. After knowing he had almost lost her there again.

Yet surprisingly, he’s also looking forward to seeing how the rebuilding turns out. With the inner rings and most of the Presidium gone, he’d heard the remains of the station had been left floating disjointedly in space until two months after the Crucible fired, when a team of salarian engineers started getting to work connecting the broken pieces. The plans for the remaining architecture, as he hears, envision the rebuilt Citadel shaped more like a stellated dodecahedron, with the future space to reapply the wings to accommodate closer docking bays.

Weird, that future children that will see the Citadel, the entire galaxy, and recognize it in no other form. They’ll read about things like _Reapers_ in textbooks — shit, his name would probably be in several — and imagine how the Presidium had looked before Sovereign and the Crucible, write essays on how the war was _nearly_ lost, theorize over papers about how stupidly the galaxy had had ignored the threat for so long.

Life goes on. If he thinks it often enough, it must be true.

Shepard’s voice says loudly from somewhere in the back, “Are you gonna make us listen to Expel 10 the entire trip?”

“Yes,” Garrus says, no longer lost in thought. He leaves the cockpit to poke around the small kitchenette. There are complimentary water bottles and dextro and levo rations, but little else. Fortunately, they’d brought enough themselves. “Because the ownership is under my name, since you technically can’t drive for another two months.”

“It’s not under your name until we sign off on the lease, and until then it’s mine,” Cortez calls jokingly from the front. “In the meantime, we’ve got all seventeen studio albums of Ricky Martin to burn through.”

Chakwas pipes up with a recommendation of some obscure human band Garrus doesn’t recognize, prompting Steve into a discussion about the merits of his favorite Latin dance-pop music. Shepard has disappeared somewhere in the back, so Garrus dips back into the nearest of the two bedrooms, which he supposes he’s wordlessly claimed for them by dumping their bags inside.

The room is simply furnished, like most of the starship, with only a bed, dresser, and small closet. Once again, Garrus is thankful that he and Shepard are used to the tightness of military ships, and even moreso that he has grown used to human furniture, sore spurs and all.

He’s staring at the simple room when it happens. Unbidden, the thought of them in this bed, together, sometime in the distant future. _Perfect size for a family_ , all the advertisements liked to say.

Garrus closes his eyes, forces himself to think in the present. One thing at a time.

“Esteemed customer.” The VI blinks into life at his right elbow, glinting pale blue lighting onto his sleeve. This close, Garrus sees it has a circular eye-shaped image within its projection, which it centers on him now.  “Your companion wishes you to join her in the rear lounge.”

It leads him down the hall to the very back, opening the last door facing the rear of the vehicle. The room is thin but wide, with nothing but smoothly curved steel separating them from the outside. In the center of the floor is the cover for the manhole that leads to the crawlspace for engineering, and — he turns — against the wall next to the door on both sides are identical low-seating couches facing the rear of the corvette. There are no lights in the ceiling; this almost looks more like a room for storage than anything else.

Shepard is sitting on the couch to his left, cane on the floor and leg stretched across the thin aisle to a low edge on the opposite wall. She gestures with a hand, inviting him. He closes the door and joins her, confused; they’re facing the back of the vehicle staring at a dark gray wall with only the VI’s lighting to see by.

“The present temperature in SUSSEX, ENGLAND is 17.8 degrees Celsius, with a low cloud cover and precipitation chance of 20% for the remaining solar day. If you would like to enjoy the view — ”

“That’ll be it, thanks,” Shepard says.

“Have a pleasant trip, ma’am.” It drifts off through the door, leaving them in darkness.

“Press that,” her voice says from the left. Turning in the dark, Garrus’s eyes are drawn to a small illuminated button glowing green next to the door; he stretches and presses it.

The steel panel they’re facing — _not_ a wall, it turns out — begins to rise. When the shutter has fully retreated into the ceiling above, he whistles.

The back of the corvette offers a wide view outside about two-thirds as large as one of the observation shutters on the Normandy. The lot they’re parked on offers a simple view of the surrounding cars and rooftops, but Garrus thinks of the sights this girl could see with the corvette on autopilot…

“See.” Shepard’s voice is quiet next to him. Probably tired. “I let you press the button this time.”

“Much appreciated.”

“Heading out,” Cortez says over the intercom. “Bags and passengers all accounted for. Pilot in the cockpit and doctor on board currently breaking out the whiskey in the galley. Can you guys hear me back there?”

“We hear you,” Garrus calls.

“Allrighty. ETA to the Citadel, three days, four hours. Get ready for several hours of some of Earth’s finest Latin pop, everyone.”

The floor begins to rumble; he can feel the ignition stirring below deck as the thrusters fire up at the bottom edges of the window.

They sit in silence for a while, watching the ground get smaller, the buildings shrink to the size of ants. Within five minutes, London lays out like a map beneath them, cranes and towers and what remains of the Reapers dotting the cityscape. Garrus doesn’t count the time. Before long, clouds have filled up the window entirely; a few minutes more, and he can make out the island of Britain, and the seas that surround it. Soon Earth’s edges appear within the frame of the window, a great blue planet against the black of the space beyond.

In four days, he’s due to meet with Quentius and Adrien to discuss his new position. The same day, Shepard has a lunch with Osoba, a meeting with Irissa —

He’d almost forgot.

“Shepard,” Garrus begins. “I spoke with Tali this morning.”

From his angle without looking down, he can’t see her turn to look at him, but he can feel it. “Everything okay?”

“She’s on her way to the Citadel. She’ll meet us there.”

“She’s — the Citadel? What for?”

“The geth project.” Garrus pauses.

Even in his own mind, he still can’t bring himself to call it ‘Project Legion.’ It feels — too soon, in a way. He knows it’s stupid, but he still finds himself wondering, perhaps, if Legion itself, even an inch of the platform they had known, might one day be discovered amidst the vast network of server hardware they had recovered from Rannoch.

Stranger things have happened.

“They, ah. They brought two units back online.”

Shepard is silent for a long moment.

Then, finally: “Funny how it all works out.” She’s not looking at him. “You think — so, um. What this means.”

Garrus catches her train of thought and pauses. “It’s just two geth,” he cautions. “But, yeah. They manufactured a temporary replacement the Reaper code that was uploaded to the geth servers. Two platforms responded positively and established a stable link. Still a long way to go for the rest of the surviving units. But there’s a possibility… for EDI.”

Shepard is quiet, and Garrus waits for a minute for her to respond, before realizing that all that might be said already has been. A possibility. That’s more than what they had a week ago, a year ago. That’s enough to go on for now.

He watches the dark emptiness of space outside and his thoughts are drawn, somehow, to the trip that Shepard must have taken when she left Earth for the first time. Garrus had grown up with frequent visits to the Citadel, to Palaven’s famous moons, to the nearest colonies for school field trips, but Earth is a single planet unto itself, the only habitable location within several surrounding systems, research bases notwithstanding. He tries to see the trip as she would have seen it as a fresh recruit, just out of basic: larger than life, surreal, perhaps so far as terrifying.

And thrilling, despite all that. He knows her. The ambition for positive change and progress would outweigh any fear, for her.

When a small, orange-reddish dot appears in the distance, no larger than an insect against the black of space, Shepard stirs.

“I heard,” she says, “they established the first self-sustainable reservoir just under Mars’s surface.” She points at the pale dot.

He hmms, amused. He has the faint impression she’s trying to one-up him with her news.

She shifts her head to look up at him, frowning slightly. “You know what Mars is.”

“Sure.” He thinks back to his intergalactic relations lessons from basic. “One of your moons.”

“God. No. It’s a neighbor planet. There.”

Garrus leans forward, squinting at it. With the angle they’re flying, it’s already quite a fair bit smaller than it had been just a moment ago; if he hadn’t known better he’d think it was a large star. “All right. So when you say sustainable…”

“Yeah. Sorta. They found evidence of old lakes there that kept melting and refreezing. Now look.” Shepard hides a yawn behind her hand. “I’m still catching up on all the news I missed while I was out. Just — the possibility of water-based life existing there is sort of a thing for us. There were all sorts of theories. Two hundred years ago, it would’ve sent NASA over the moon and now we’ve got colonies on dozens of planets outside our solar system. Still, it’s… you know a century ago they were saying life developing there would be impossible.”

“Ah, well.” Garrus leans his head back; his fringe hits the wall and he sinks further down until his neck rests comfortably on the leather back. “What do scientists really know?”

“They know how to ignore and bicker around a Reaper threat until it crash-lands into their door.”

“Shame,” he says around a yawn. “So, underground water and oxygen. Earth might have some interesting neighbors in about fifty thousand years.” He can’t remember the last time turians found habitable conditions within their home solar system. “Congratulations.”

“If we’re not extinct by then.”

Shepard leans back into the couch, sinking low. The side of her jaw, where a fading pink scar runs from ear to chin, finds a home in his carapace, and he feels her warm breath on exhale as she settles into him, at last. “Yeah. Maybe.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first Mass Effect fic of a significant length, not to mention the longest thing I've written in several years, so reviews and concrit would be very much appreciated. Either way, thank you kindly for reading.
> 
> This fic is complete, but if you've enjoyed it and are at all curious for more in this 'verse, please consider subscribing to my series on AO3. The link to it should be below these notes or in the info bar. As of April 2017, I'm working on a follow-up (sequel, but can be read stand-alone) following their lives on the Citadel.


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